Now that Raceday 2026 is in the books, we’d like to extend our annual offer to new graduates: one year of free BAA membership! If you’re interested, please sign up at https://cmubuggy.org/seniors. And for anyone else hoping to vote in our upcoming elections who hasn’t renewed their membership yet this year, be sure to do so as soon as possible! Thank you all for your continued support, and welcome new alumni to your Buggy Alumni Association.

Raceday 2026 is right around the corner! Active BAA members will receive the 2026 Raceday Preview in their email soon! Please see our membership page to check your status as an active member of the Buggy Alumni Association. If you need to renew your membership, please do send us a membership update request, and we’ll be sure to get the Raceday Preview to you ASAP once its released. If keeping up with annual dues is a hassle, consider becoming a Golden Goose Lifetime Member, and your donation will help keep the buggy enthusiasm running for generations!

Supporting the Buggy Alumni Association is a great way to support the greater buggy community. We have teams of dedicated volunteers documenting the history of the sport, facilitating the raceday broadcast, hosting events for students, friends, family, and alumni year round, and connecting students with resources to help keep their team on the course.

The teams committee has a new revision of The Essential Build Book. This is a major rework thanks to DG’s feedback while building their first buggy, Banta! This year, teams received financial support from the BAA to fund safety improvements, bringing older buggies up to modern safety standards.

From our history and website committees, we’ve published the earliest known Raceday video – the Finals of Raceday 1930! We have updated our database for 1930 and added photos of each of the 8 buggies that competed that year to our gallery. Our plans to post more historical Racedays to YouTube continues. Those who attend Carnival this year will get a special sneak peek – If you’re back for your 35th Reunion (Class of ’91) or you were in CIA 50 years ago (1976), make sure to stop by Buggy Showcase (or find the BAA with a laptop) and you’ll get to watch your Raceday, in preparation for Raceday 2026.

We continue to expand our Buggy photo gallery, with over 41,000 photos and videos of buggy from the past 126 years now on our site. And the (daunting) task of tagging and captioning all of those photos for easy viewing reference presses on. We’ve continued to update our database with more race information from the 1980s-1990s, trying to make it as complete as possible (including rosters).

Safe travels! Get hyped! We’ll see you on the course!

As anyone familiar with Buggy knows, the BAA is constantly looking for opportunities to better connect students, alumni, and the wider community with the sport that we all love. For example, this year the BAA has worked to improve our support for new teams by refreshing the buggy build book, expanded our history database with race details from the 1980s and 1990s, and started to provide limited video coverage of freeroll practices.

With that in mind, we wanted to find a new way for fans of the sport to engage with the vast collection of knowledge that is contained in the BAA community. As many Carnegie Mellon students and alumni know, AI is proving to be a technology that is allowing people to learn things that just a few years ago they would have never believed to be true.

Of course, we already have experience in the BAA with Artificial Intelligence through our raceday predictions provided by MechaJockey. However, we wanted to find a way for the greater community to actively engage with our data and alumni experience from the last hundred years. MechaJockey is not efficient enough to run full time interactively (and besides, who knows what MechaJockey might do to us meatbags). Thus we needed to develop a new, vibrant, and ovine-forward approach. A chatbot was really the only possible answer to meet these needs.

With that in mind, we herded multiple departments at the university including the CS department, Computing Services, and Landscaping to shepherd the necessary skills to bring such an experience to life. Together, this group of experts have developed a new form of LLM that we call the neural flock (paper to be published later this year in the respected journal “Colamborations of the ACM”).

Thus, today we are pleased to announce SchenleyAI, available for public use on our discord. As an early beta, SchenleyAI is able to answer simple yes or no questions. It has been extensively trained on all of our most active discord discussions, as well as the older forum archives, history data, photos, rolls reports, and miscellaneous other buggy content we have at our disposal. As it happens, the insights provided by our most vocal alumni proved to be the key to bring this vast knowledge together.

Today’s release is the beginning — a beta test capable of responding to your yes or no questions about buggy (we’re keeping it simple, as things always have a risk of going wrong with new Buggy Software). You can try it today in any of our public discord channels. Simply preface your question with ‘$schenley‘. For example:

Our experiences so far have been Not Baaaaaad, but we look forward to seeing what everyone else can bleat out of it. We can hardly imagine all the new concepts that AI will bring to our favorite sport. Log into our discord and give it a try today!

Update: We would like to thank everyone for participating in our initial test of SchenleyAI. However, upon reflection, training on the chats of the most vocal and opinionated alumni might not have been the best plan, and we have discontinued the service and placed SchenleyAI into a virtual field where he can frolic and graze to his heart’s content.

The BAA Teams Committee has three funding opportunities available to current buggy teams for the 2025-2026 academic year:

We are continuing to offer our New Build Grant. If your team has not rolled a new buggy in the past 4 years, the BAA will reimburse up to $500 of build related expenses. This applies to new and ongoing builds.

In addition to the New Build Grant, we’re excited to announce the availability of a Retrofit Grant. This grant is available to fund up to $300 for retrofits on any currently non-rollable buggy to make it rollable and bylaws compliant.

Both of these grants are handled on a reimbursement basis. Reach out to Diya Nuxoll <diyanuxoll@cmubuggy.org> if you are interested in taking advantage of this funding!

And finally, as a continuation of our previous Hard Point Retrofit Funding, the BAA has provided Sweepstakes with funds to bulk purchase the supplies required for the recommended hard point retrofit methodology. If you are interested in performing this retrofit, please contact the RD26 Sweepstakes Mechanical Safety Chair, Sam Green <slgreen@andrew.cmu.edu>.

As always, even if none of these apply to your team, reach out to the BAA Teams Committee if you would like help finding sustainable sources of funding for your team, need advice to support your build, or need to find an extra set of hands for a critical work session.

A few quick news updates from the BAA!

First, congratulations to Cynthia Xu, who has been elected as our new Comms chair! Cynthia is a 2023 SPIRIT Alum and we’re excited to have her join the board!

Second, we recently sent out our October member’s newsletter. If you are a member (check the list), and you didn’t get it in your email, please make sure we have your most recent contact information by filling in this member update form.

Finally, we’re running a survey for everyone who considers themself a part of the buggy community to let us know what matters most to you. Regardless of if you are a student, alumni, or just a fan, please give us your feedback!

Happy Thursday buggy fans!

We at the BAA Teams Committee are taking advantage of a weekend without rolls to run our first ever “Composites 101” course for current buggy students.

When? Saturday 9/28, 2-3pm
Where? Wean Hall, 4625

We’ll be covering topics such as:

• What are the pros and cons of different carbon fiber weave types?
• What are the best core material choices for a team on a budget?
• What is the difference between a wet layup and resin infusion? Can I use the same materials? And what the heck is prepreg carbon fiber?
• How do we validate composite parts in industry… and why does that not necessarily work for us in the buggy world?

This course is geared to be accessible to new teams and freshmen buggy mechanics– but there should be plenty of interesting info for more experienced buggy mechanics as well.

Alumni– no need to feel left out! If you’re interested in getting involved with the BAA Teams Committee, to help us expand our collection of open-source buggy resources, please email Diya (BAA Quartermaster / Teams Committee Lead) at diyanuxoll@cmubuggy.org.