We have one more weekend before its Truck Weekend, folks! We’re seeing more and more teams qualifying their drivers. Meanwhile, we have some late additions to the field, with SAE showing up for their first weekend of rolls this year. This week, we also have another video report from Rob, available here. In the reports leading up to Raceday, we’ll now be Highlighting any buggies that are qualified to race! Carryover rules have changed, so please bear with us as we try to crunch the numbers correctly…
| Org | Saturday | Sunday |
|---|---|---|
| Apex | Molotov, Solaris, Scorch, Kerosene | Helios, Molotov, Solaris, Kerosene |
| CIA | Goldfinch, Roadrunner, Kingfisher | Starling, Emperor |
| DG | Insite | Banta, Insite |
| Fringe | Blind Faith, Blackbird, “🅱️ovanni” | Blackbird, Bermuda, Baltic |
| Robobuggy | NAND, Short Circuit | NAND, Short Circuit |
| SAE | Barbie | — |
| SDC | — | Paranoia, Lust, Vice |
| SigNu | Jaeger | Jaeger |
| Spirit | Kingpin, Seraph, Inviscid, Zuke | Kingpin, Seraph, Zuke |
Photos: Saturday Gallery (Upload) | Sunday Gallery (Upload)
General Observations
- We had rain Friday night, ending early Saturday morning. Between the fairly warm weather, some breeze, and a little time, the roads were mostly dry by the time rolls were actually getting started. They were certainly better than during Mini Raceday in November, but SDC decided to scratch for the day early in the morning.
- With teams getting their drivers qualified, it looks like more teams are being able to dedicate more resources into getting the rest of their race squared up. Full hills, possibly some wheel treating or extra tune-ups and teams are noticeably faster this weekend compared to last.
- The minor inconvenience this weekend was apparently losing hatches. We lost 3 back hatches across the 2 days. If only we had sports betting for what the top DQ item would be…
Team Observations
- Apex — Early on Sunday, Apex debuted ANOTHER new buggy! Kind of — robotic buggy “Kelvin” made their debut with a course walk pre-sunrise. Back in the human-sized buggy category, Apex didn’t have any incidents or events to report on this weekend. However, I will note that it seems like Kerosene isn’t rolling as fast as some of their other buggies. In fact, both Molotov and Solaris, two of their older buggies, were rolling up higher than Scorch or Kerosene on Hill 3. Maybe they just have to work out all those new-buggy bugs.
- CIA — CIA isn’t bringing out a new buggy this year, but we did see a paint-free buggy on the course this weekend. Initially I thought it was maybe Goldfinch, but turns out this was Starling (with a potentially shorter pushbar? See a side-by-side below). Their buggies looked good through the freeroll this weekend, though there might be some details to hash out in terms of their relative speeds, as I saw Emperor catch up to Starling at the end of the Chute and nearly take out their Hill 3’s ankles.
- DG — Sunday, DG got a real taste of running a multi buggy team. It looks like they didn’t have quite enough pushers to cover their backhills — Shoutout to the SPIRIT pushers helping out here. DG was also one of the teams to lose a back hatch, leading to a stop flag thrown, and their following buggy to blow through them. Better to learn this lesson now than on Raceday, though.
- Fringe — This week, Fringe has given me something worth writing about! For the second week in a row, we had pesky pedestrians. With a guy on the bales as the Blackbird and Blind Faith were coming up on the chute flag, they got stop flags and both came to a stop during Saturday’s rolls. Meanwhile, on Sunday, Bermuda’s driver brake and came to a controlled stop at the bottom of Hill 3 after running into a vision problem after the chute
- Robobuggy — Seems like Robobuggy was having some trouble out on the course this weekend. Saturday they hit the curb a couple of times, which perhaps influenced their decision to jog their buggies around the course on Sunday. Since last week, Short Circuit has also gained a shell, meaning both robobuggies internals are covered.
- SAE — We saw Barbie for the first time this year on Saturday. They were rolling together with Fringe to help pad out their rolls count, getting to 6 rolls compared to the 3-4 times through the rolls order, despite only being out one day. There is still time to qualify, but we’ll see how quickly the team is able to learn and iron out all their operational kinks.
- SDC — SDC stayed home Saturday, but was back out again on Sunday. We did see Vice sporting a new gold tint windshield, as well as get around the course without incident this week. She was still on bags, but there are still a few weekends to get up to top speed. Paranoia and Lust did not look as quick as usual, but that may have just been the step change of improvement we saw from a lot of the other teams this weekend.
- SigNu — I’ve probably been most impressed with SigNu’s performance in terms of how they are just hitting the ground running. In just a few days, their driver has gone from starting fresh this spring after a few years off from driving, to putting up rollouts on par with some of the SDC rolls. However, I can’t say that any of their pushers have blown me away with how quick they are. We’ll see if they’re hiding some quick guys in the chapter who haven’t made it out yet, or if they’re able to recruit a competitive Women’s/All Gender team.
- Spirit — Saturday we saw 2 of them being classic primer-grey, causing buggy archivists concern about how to ID them properly. However, by Sunday, they had already gotten base paint layers on both Zuke (Blue) and Kingpin (Orange). On the performance side, Seraph was looking really good this weekend. By Sunday, they were also rolling far up Hill 3 consistently, with some preliminary timing showing them as having the fastest freeroll this weekend. However, we also saw Zuke fishtail (but recover) and Kingpin spin (their driver is ok). Overall, I have high hopes for their A-team, but think they may struggle with the consistency for producing results further down their roster.
As always, if you would like to help contribute notes or photos/video for these rolls reports, you can sign up to help here or reach out to Dan.
If you have additional notes or corrections, feel free to reach out to myself (@jamestwong on Discord / jameswong@cmubuggy.org) or Dan (@.dbec on Discord / danbecerra@cmubuggy.org).
Thanks to Rob and Guillermo for their contributions this week!