Can we hear too?

SORRY, CAN'T DO THAT. BESIDES, YOU DON'T WANT TO GO DOWN THAT ROAD. SOME OF THE PEOPLE YOU'LL MEET WILL LEAVE A MARK WHICH YOU'LL NEVER SHAKE, A TAINT WHICH WILL BE OBVIOUS TO THOSE WHO HAVE ALSO TROD THAT PATH.

Mostly true if you remove Spirit in your list of elite teams. I do not. I expect the most interesting aspect of the spring will be watching ot see if/when they get wheel tech to put them in the hunt. Given their efforts (they are clearly trying) the flow of info within/between the independent buggy groups and the flow of info leaking from other gravity events, I suspect it will not be long before someone's exclusive deal becomes even less exclusive.

Last I heard efforts were focused primarily on acquiring and implementing a highly ambitious wheel program centered on the seldom-utilized 'ski' principle. If recent weather trends hold constant I think they have an excellent chance at winning with this new technology.

I peed myself a little....


Since the top 3 or 4 (if you're including spirit) seem like a dead heat before spring rolls knowledge, what about the second half of the top ten? Does anyone care?

Also, there's a huge snow/ice bank near the chute. Even if we have a melt-down that pile will still be there, we're going to have to shovel it out before we roll, methinks.

Is there a reason that nobody's mentioning SigEP? It seems pretty silly to be talking about Spirit challenging the top 3, without mentioning SigEP. Especially given SigEP's steady improvement over the last few years, not to mention being faster than Spirit last year.

We tried to set up the SigEp / Spirit rivalry in our member's only fall wrap-up. They were within a second of each other in freerolls for the fall semester, .02 apart on mini raceday and traded spots on the leader board between prelims and finals last year. We summed it up in that analysis by predicting that one of them would make the top 5 this year, but not both. I think it's one of the more interesting story lines shaping up for this raceday. The only thing lacking is that they don't seem to think of each other in a rivalrous way as far as I can tell. SigEp is racing for respect as one of the real contenders, and Spirit is racing against their own history.

Sam is, again, spot on. I think sigep is trying to move out of the spirit rivalry, and into that top 3 spot. They build every year, and the majority of their push team is intact from last year, and last year they were fifth by accident, in my opinion, ... if we look at the numbers -

They were ahead of fringe and only .05 (smaller than the error in our timing system) behind PiKA before re-rolls. If they had found a reason to re-roll (NOT THAT ANYONE SHOULD) they might have pushed out SDC B, whom they were only .35 behind. Of course this is very speculative, but .35 seconds or even .5 seconds is any number of small mistakes in pushing or a sticky bearing.

I don't know if SigEp will break into the top three. The other teams on the course are more experienced and definitely great competitors, but I don't think we should expect SigEp to lose any ground from last year.

As for a "spirit" rivalry ... spirit was a full 2 seconds behind SigEp and their Day 1 time last year. That doesn't show well for a team trying to move it up... I can't with any certainty say they won't be a force to be reckoned with this year but I'm thinking unless something drastic happens we'll see a greater stratification between SigEp and spirit.

My bad in leaving out sig ep. They should be in the hunt for a top 3 and are likely to improve over last year as they master their new (09) wheels and improve their buggies. In 08, they only lacked a good set of wheels from being in the hunt. Their finish of 2.15.19 in 08 given their freeroll was impressive. In 09 they added a tasty roll and laid down a 2.08.55. Silly to overlook them. IMO, they have more upside potential than most of their rivals. Spirit has the most upside potential in 2010.

Wow, I totally didn't notice that Sig Ep went sub 2:10. That's a very exclusive group.