The leaves are falling, the donuts are dashing, and the teams are wrapping up final preparations before next weekeend. Also, this rolls report contains a data-dive bonus feature with times from this weekend fueling my predictions for Mini Raceday.
Mini Raceday is coming up and slated for November 14 and 15 — if you’re in Pittsburgh and want to help out with collecting timing splits, reach out to Rob (robsiemborski@cmubuggy.org)
| Org | Saturday | Sunday |
|---|---|---|
| Apex | Molotov, Solaris | Helios, Molotov |
| CIA | Kingfisher, Roadrunner | Kingfisher, Roadrunner |
| DG | Banta | — |
| Fringe | Blackbird, Baltic, Blind Faith | Blackbird, Beetle |
| PiKA | Raptor | — |
| SDC | Vice, Lust, Avarice | Vice, Lust, Avarice |
| Spirit | Seraph, Inviscid, Zuke, Kingpin | Seraph, Inviscid, Kingpin |
Photos: Saturday Gallery (upload) | Sunday Gallery (upload)
General Observations
- Donut Dash this weekend! Saturday saw SAE trying to steal the buggy barricades. Usually we’d blame this behavior on clueless pledges, but rumor on the street was that one of these brothers is also their buggy chair. Eventually they found their own barricades. However, they didn’t do a great job cleaning up either. Sunday morning they left their barricades in the street along with a pile of vomit. Luckily this was up by monument and not in the chute, like a different vomit pile of years past…
- One must imagine Sweepsyphus happy. The leaves have started falling in earnest and with some orgs failing to show up to do their chores, it was all hands on deck (Sweepstakes included) to get the freeroll swept on Saturday. However, it was also gusty and as soon as the sweeping was done, the leave came right back onto the road. By Sunday, they seemed to have learned their lesson and anticipate some orgs wouldn’t actually show up to do their chores and started earlier.
- Everyone is light on people. Teams were catching for each other, pushing for each other, and soliciting alumni to push hills (with mixed success). I think every org this weekend had their pushers doubling up on hills at some point. Despite the lack of manpower, teams found one way or another to get some practice in on the front hills in preparation for Mini Raceday.
Team Observations
- Apex — Another weekend, another report that I get to say that Apex has some of the fastest rolls. Aside from fast pace in the freeroll, they are keeping that momentum up onto Hill 3, and they have some quick pushers on the backhills as well. I think they are a strong favorite to do well next weekend for Mini Raceday.
- CIA — CIA did not stay at the bottom of the hill for long, moving back up to the top of the hill this weekend. On Saturday, Kingfisher came to a stop on the back hills near the Hill 3-4 transition, for a loss of mass (we think an RTK kit). Of their 2 buggies out this weekend, Kingfisher was rolling faster through the freeroll, but a strong Hill 3 could often make up time pushing Roadrunner.
- DG — DG made the briefest appearance on Saturday. They didn’t even join the rolls order, only choosing to roll with CIA in a single round to get in their pass test for Banta. Unfortunately they were out longer than they probably wanted due to how long it took for rolls to get going from the leaves on the course.
- Fringe — There was only one real hiccup for Fringe this weekend. Blind Faith came to a stop near transition, but both the buggy and driver were fine. On Saturday, Fringe managed to bring a proper cohort of pushers and have 3 buggies out and rolling with some front hills. However, by Sunday, they were forming a big independent buggy conglomeration. They orchestrated support from Apex, SDC, and CIA to push and catch on Hill 5 (mostly for the bit) and exchanged pushers with CIA throughout the morning.
- PiKA — Another Saturday-only appearance from PiKA. Raptor had one roll with a large slide in the chute, but she corrected and avoided spinning. The driver continued to improve over the morning, but overall she looks to be rolling well even with relatively few total rolls. Towards the end of the day though, my spider-sense was tingling (the one that knows when an org forgot to send someone to Hill 3) and I ended up picking up Raptor a couple times.
- SDC — The last 2 weeks, we’ve started to see SDC come off of bags. They also managed to get 3 buggies pass tested right in time for Mini Raceday. Vice is definitely one of the fastest buggies out this weekend, but she also had a couple of small slides in the chute. She also seemed to hit something like a resonant mode in the chute, bouncing through most of her rolls. The rest of SDC’s buggies still aren’t as quick as some of the other teams yet, but I think they are holding back some speed. SDC was particularly light on pushers on Sunday, trying to solicit some members of the BAA to push a Hill 1. For some reason, this was deemed better than asking one of their dozen mechanics…
- Spirit — Spirit also kept up the pace this weekend. Surprisingly, it looked like they had some newer pushers on the backhills, as I saw several got burned badly as Seraph, Zuke, and Inviscid flew past them. Once they got the hang of things, though, they were certainly fast. I’m also happy to report that Kingpin came off of bags this weekend and looked much cleaner and confident through the chute than what I’ve seen in the past.
Pre-Mini Raceday Readout
Thanks to Rob, we’ve been getting near-weekly data summaries of the pace of the orgs and buggies on the course. This week, I’ve taken the liberty of making a couple nice graphs to help summarize the overall trends and support what I’ve been seeing on the ground week-over-week.
I’ll be focusing on crosswalk to finish times, since the front hills data has some strange outliers, and many times teams did not push front hills. We have no data from the crosswalk to entrance of chute times, but hopefully I can do another post-Mini Raceday analysis.
Our first view gives us the view by org and we get to see the couple trends that I’ve been seeing over the last few weeks. Apex and Spirit are ahead, with CIA falling behind. SDC now has some times that are able to compete with Spirit and Apex, though.
If we break things out by buggy, the picture starts to get clearer. We get to see that orgs definitely have stronger buggies, one that stands out to me here is Vice moving noticeably faster than either Avarice or Lust. We also see that while Molotov, Seraph, and Helios have been in contention for fastest times since Fall Break, that the rest of Apex’s fleet is much closer together in pace.
One more view that I found interesting — this one breaks out how times changed between Saturday and Sunday for buggies that rolled both days. Many teams like CIA, Spirit, and Apex got noticeably slower, from push teams or driver differences. On the flip side, Fringe sees Blackbird get faster as its now their only buggy out that day (aside from a pass test with Beetle). Meanwhile, SDC continued to get faster on both Avarice and Vice on Sunday.
So, what do I make of all this? I think Apex, Spirit, and SDC are all in contention for the top time, at least on the men’s side. If I had to place bets, I think Vice will end up coming out on top. For the women, I’ll give it to Apex. All Gender will be a tossup per usual. And as always, predictions here are only as good as teams maintaining the same behavior going in to next weekend. And if there was a time for something unexpected, be it buggies, pushers, or wheels, it would be for Mini Raceday (at least in the fall).
Some major caveats here — the big one being that none of these break out rolls by gender. That data should firm up more at Mini Raceday. We have a lack of front hills data, along with pass tests included in these times. Finally, I don’t have a good sense for how many teams were doing proper race prep with wheels, heating, or even their anticipated push rosters.
Thanks to Guillermo and Rob for pictures and notes this week!
If you’d like to come out to gather notes or pictures during rolls, feel free to sign up here. Links to upload photos are there, and if you would like to be credited, reach out via email (data@cmubuggy.org) or on Discord (@Barsham). Additional notes and corrections to this report are welcome, reach out via email (jameswong@cmubuggy.org) or on Discord (@jamestwong)