• Raceday is approaching and you can tell from the list of teams and buggies out. For the first time this year we have every active org in the rolls report, all 11. Teams are also combining in the rolls order to get everyone practice. On Sunday we saw SDC and PiKA roll together as well as Fringe and SAE. They were very successful, as every buggy that wants to roll on Raceday has at least 1 driver qualified! The teams can spend next weekend focusing on fine-tuning.
  

The other Fringe new buggy

• Weather was a bit of a factor this week. A serious storm rolled through and left debris along the course including a pile of mud and rocks in the chute. The sweepers were very busy, and even so it was difficult to clear the course. We also heard reports of gravel making its way into buggies. It was also chilly and most of the teams decided to stage down near the bottom of Hill 1 to do full pushes.

Banta continues to roll!

• This weekend also saw fast buggies, tight lines, and a few incidents. Read on for all the details! We had a few pusher falls and a good bit of fishtailing from the forward trikes as they added speed. Our intrepid BAA reporters were out gathering data, including more freeroll times. Look for those details in our Raceday Preview next week, available to members only! Renew Here!

Kerosene, the newest Apex buggy, wasn’t out but I wanted to keep the theme here, so this is from last week

• Apex. Apex was rolling 2 buggies on Saturday and just 1 on Sunday. Helios on Sunday started the day turning a tad late for my taste. Sometimes she seems to turn straight for the chute stop sign before she always completes the turn very smoothly. The line was adjusted throughout the day. Their other buggies rolled well on Saturday. Overall they move around the course well and always have a strong contingent out at rolls.

Helios Sunday

• CIA. Starling is in the midst of re-painting after the adjustments we discussed in last week’s report. Roadrunner was her only companion Sunday. On one roll, Roadrunner encountered an issue and needed to be extracted on Hill 4, but was back for the next roll. Saturday CIA had a double stop with Emperor dragging a wheel on the curb when breaking, but she also returned next roll. Emperor on Saturday was looking to be their fastest buggy through the freeroll, and their buggies were maybe slightly slower Sunday. Starling also almost lost a data logger as it detached in the chute and was dragging along by its wire. They continue to have a large presence around the course and look to have one of the deepest teams.

CIA’s deep team catching Goldfinch

• DG. Banta returned Saturday along with Insite. On one roll Insite stopped just past Scaife (just enough to have the following org cleared), causing the CIA stop mentioned earlier. On another roll the Insite Hill 5 pusher just missed the pushbar and took a fall, but they seemed to bounce back fine. Banta is looking closer to a final paint job, we’re excited to see that!

A DG fleet!

• Fringe. Fringe was rolling consistently and sharing their slot with other teams as well, helping SAE get more rolls Sunday. Saturday they had a bit of a scary incident with a biker traveling on the course meeting a bagged Baltic in the chute. They were able to avoid each other thankfully. The biggest news for Fringe was the debut of their second build of the year! This buggy is a real throwback to older designs, look for many pictures in our gallery. On Saturday before rolls started it was jogged down from the monument to get a short roll in. Will Sweeps bring it back for exhibitions? Time will tell!

Fringe Freeroll in Formation

• Robobuggy. Robobuggy brought out one buggy with shell and one buggy sans shell this week. Maybe it was for technical reasons or maybe Short Circuit just wanted to feel the air in its gears a few more times. They had one incident where NAND decided to stop on Hill 2, but otherwise got a few times through all the way around the course.

Robo Transition!

• PiKA. Out on Saturday and Sunday. On Sunday they mostly rolled their newer driver, who started with some bags but was moving well without them by the end. On one roll the Hill 3 pusher wasn’t quite in position, so BAA Events Chair and expert rolls watcher James Wong went to save it. Their transition flag has always been different than the others, but recently we’ve see the chute flagger standing in the road on their rolls. They will need to be really careful on Raceday!

PiKA Chute flagging

• SAE. Barbie accumulated many rolls on Sunday including sharing time with Fringe and a pass test. The first time they passed Blackbird too early, but the second time around they passed Bermuda and it counted! Given the limited number of rolls they have had this year the buggy is moving well.

Barbie

• SDC. Paranoia was rolling very well this weekend as usual. We also saw Lust and Vice deliver some solid driving at speed in the chute. Vice started the weekend with bags but progressively shed them and got up to speed well. One Hill 5 pusher took a tumble while pushing Vice towards the finish, but seemed to get up OK. (It was something of a theme this week across orgs!) Unfortunately, on the final roll of the day Sunday, Lust had some trouble heading into the chute and spun into the inside bales. It seemed that the bales did their job and the driver emerged OK. After many good lines this weekend we look forward to seeing them back out! Their overall speed puts SDC towards the top of the order without question.

SDC Prep

• SigEp. Barracuda only rolled on Saturday. At one point, a pusher was missing at Hill 3 and BAA Events chair James Wong not only held it, but this time took a turn pushing up the hill. Overall Barracuda continues to move around the course well and we know their pushers can always show up on Raceday!

Cuda turn

• SigNu. By our eyes and watches Jaeger is posting very nice times in the freeroll. Some of our alumni also reported their pushers were looking up to the task as well. Always a wild card so we’ll see how they look in the next two weeks!

Jaeger start

• Spirit. Seraph on Saturday in particular rolled very well, and they had all four buggies rolling both days with some nice rolls. The enthusiasm this team and its pushers brought was very impressive this weekend, and I would look to them if anyone would be able to challenge CIA and SDC for a win this year. (If you want our full predictions and analysis, you’ll need to join the BAA and read our Raceday Preview!)

Zuke’s new blue

• Volunteers. WE NEED YOUR HELP to make Raceday run smoothly and help the students! Sign up to volunteer here!

Only YOU can keep the course clear and make sure timing goes smoothly! (Yes, there will be donuts)

• 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.

• Apex — Apex had a fairly smooth weekend, running a 3-deep roster alongside their new buggy debut. The only hiccup came from a pesky pedestrian — with the transition flagger throwing a stop flag before the situation could escalate. Impressive how buggies are easier to control than pedestrians. Other than that, Apex had a clean couple of rolls.

• CIA — Usually when doing a pass test, you only keep one buggy bagged. During an unintentional pass, we got to see a double-bagged pass in the chute that was very reminiscent of the CIA/Fringe pass in the chute from 2025. Aside from this, CIA had a relatively uneventful weekend, rolling well both days.

• DG — Plenty of excitement abound, with DG bringing out their new buggy, Banta. They very confidently shoved off from Hill 2 for its first roll around the course, and I’m happy to report we saw no trouble on its first weekend out! They also got to make the jump from being a single buggy team, to running 2 buggies with Insite out on Sunday. Insite needed a bit of a Hill 2.5 bump after getting slowed by its first bagged roll, but recovered throughout the morning as it shed bags.

• Fringe — We only got to see Fringe’s new buggy out on Saturday this week, so we aren’t able to make super confident statements about how fast it’ll look without bags. They brought out Blackbird and Bermuda on both Saturday and Sunday, and got in a pass test.

• PiKA — PiKA’s pushers on the backhills seemed a bit disorganized. I hear they were missing their Hill 3 pickup on the first roll of the weekend. Neither of their Hill 4 to 5 transitions I watched were really transitions, with their Hill 4 either shoving off way after or way before the transition zone. However, Raptor showed good speed coming through the chute and rolling up Hill 3. Hopefully with push practice starting this week, their pushers will figure out how to properly hand off before Raceday.

• Robobuggy — We saw Robobuggy bring out both NAND and Short Circuit to the course this week. This week, they had NAND fully dressed up with its top shell and LEDs. While it took them a while to fully get up to speed, by the end of Sunday they were coming through the chute at a respectable pace.

• SDC — This weekend was certainly a mixed bag for SDC. On one hand, you had Paranoia looking quick across the course, with their pushers clearly running hard. On the other, they struggled getting Avarice and Vice around the course. Both came to controlled stops for fogging/vision related issues. And in the one roll where things were looking promising for their new drivers, Lust’s hatch came unsecured at the end of the chute, forcing them to stop Vice midway through the freeroll.

• SigEp — We saw SigEp out only on Saturday this weekend, rolling Barracuda. Cuda had a smooth day, and their pushers were looking fairly quick as well. They should need just one more day on the course in order to get their driver qualified.

• SigNu — It was our first time seeing SigNu back this year, bringing out Jaeger. Here we see the return from a “Technically New” driver, with them having raced back in 2023. Either way, they looked fairly comfortable getting back up to speed over this weekend.

• Spirit — Sunday, we saw our first proper accident of the year with Zuke taking a spin in the chute and bumping the inner haybales. Their driver is ok, and we’ll see next week whether they try to change their line to avoid getting into spin territory again. Aside from that, we also saw clean rolls from both Inviscid and Seraph this weekend.

Kerosene

Apex has now debuted their 10th buggy — sporting some very fashionable wild west capybara wrapping paper. While I heard some murmurings that it was not wrapped well and falling off at the butt, I am much more confident that their carbon wraps went much better.

Banta

We’re told that the name for Banta comes from George Banta, an influential figure in the founding of DG (also conveniently could be a portmanteau of Katy Zapanta and Sophia Battaglia’s last names, prominent pioneers of DG’s buggy program)

We at the BAA are very excited to see Banta out on the course, as it would be the first sorority-built buggy to complete the course on Raceday!

“Borse”*

Borse is not the official name of Fringe’s new buggy. Please do not use this name during the broadcast on Raceday. The philosophical question posed to the buggy community writ large is, who would win a triathlon — you or a horse? I think my answer is contingent on finding a horse-sized bike. Feel free to debate in the comments, or over on Discord.

• Pittsburgh was buried in snow in late January this year. See some highlights from CMU’s Instagram here of students enjoying it! That meant some extra work cleaning up after the winter. The bike lanes needed shoveling out, and the area where the bales are stored was covered in a glacial amount of snow. The teams rallied when we got a few nicer days last week and cleared it all out.
  

The leftovers from Snowmaggedon 2. The teams pushed this down into the ravine where it may persist to Raceday

• It was a chilly day on Saturday but 8 teams still made it out. Saturday only this weekend, as some more snow rolled in Sunday. Thankfully we avoided another blizzard (unlike our eastern neighbors) so the course should be safe for when the students get back from Spring break.

Last roll of the day Saturday

• The first day back from a long break usually means teams are a bit rusty and we expect some stops, wobbly lines, or other incidents. But this weekend was different, as all drivers worked their way around the course without any problems! All started with bags, but many were off them by the end of the day.

Apex’s Solaris one of many clean chute turns

• Apex. Brought out a lot of people and buggies this weekend. All of them made it through the chute very well. On the very last roll though, there was a missed connection between flagger and org, and the last buggy (Molotov) didn’t get a chute flag out in advance. The flagger realized and waved the flag in front of the buggy right as it was to turn. She knew what she was doing though and seemed to make the turn without even needing the flag.

Apex Hill 2!

• CIA. It was a relatively light weekend for CIA with only two buggies rolling. Most noticeable was Goldfinch sporting a fresh paint job, with the nose that was previously damaged in a crash looking like new. While not confirmed, I’ve also heard the some of their drivers that rolled this weekend may now be fully qualified for Raceday (given that they passed in the Fall). Once we get closer to Raceday I will be keeping track of all qualifications in the report.

Another view of Goldfinch!

• DG. The biggest news in the buggy community leading into this day of rolls was DG’s new buggy. It had caped during the week, and we were eagerly awaiting the debut on the course. I even consulted our archivist and was ready with some unique historical comparisons. But, due to missing some key personnel, DG only rolled Insite this weekend. She rolled smoothly as always. We will have to wait until at least March 14th now!

Solid buggy, wrong hoodie

• Fringe. Very smooth day of rolls for Fringe and their 2 buggies that were out. I also hear they have a new build caped that we will see soon. They have become the most consistently building org on the course without a doubt. Every year without fail we see another reverse trike with an interesting paint job.

catching

• PiKA. Raptor returned, and was driven by two drivers this weekend. Including, the first rolls for a new driver! She moved around the course confidently so we hope to see some more depth from PiKA soon with another buggy rolling.

PiKA’s head driver getting a new driver ready to roll

• Robobuggy. Robo joined the order again this weekend and had both of their buggies out. There were some exciting races on the front hills, but as usual they don’t acquire a ton of momentum in the freeroll- especially with the cold and wind this weekend. The nearest thing to a true incident was at the finish line when a pusher didn’t catch the bar and did a dive that turned into a barrel roll. You can see it in the video rolls report posted above!

Robo races

• SDC. Paranoia picked up right where she left off and was the fastest buggy on the course to my eye. Lust was also rolling well and still working to fine-tune the line.

Paranoia still sporting the Halloween costume

• Spirit. All 4 of Spirit’s currently active buggies were rolling this weekend. It’s the first time in a while that I can remember Spirit having more buggies out in a day than any other org. No signs of the occasional sliding or spinning issues that we have seen in the past, very clean through the chute.

Very nice Chute this weekend

• Some non-team specific highlights from this semester: the earliest start to rolls in at least two decades ; food festivals on Flagstaff ; Pittsburgh firefighters pushing buggies ; more angry geese than usual and heats on Mini-Raceday! All the rolls reports are collected here, going back many years- if you want some end-of-year reading!

A Pittsburgh firefighter on Hill 2 (video can be seen in the gallery of Oct 4)

• Apex. Helios (with 2 drivers) was the second most-rolled buggy this year across all the teams- which goes to show the dedication of this team. 3 other buggies also accumulated more than 20 rolls for Apex. They were out every weekend, and Helios especially has shown the benefit of all that practice with smoother lines and more speed.

Many reps for Helios this semester

• CIA. CIA had 5 total buggies rolling, more than any other org this year. They were fairly free of incidents and producing solid rollouts. CIA always has a large contingent of folks at rolls and they have the most tech strapped to their buggies gathering data. The Fall culminated with some fast times on Mini-Raceday, including the fastest Women’s times. Look for them to contend again in 2026.

Goldfinch rolled the most for CIA this fall

• DG. Delta Gamma limited their participation this fall, which is a similar story to past years. Readers of the reports know that I have been talking up their build for many weeks now, and I’m making a prediction here; we will see this build in the spring (I have no real inside information on this, just the enthusiasm I am hearing). When that is completed and if they can add another driver, they can cement the depth needed to build a great and lasting buggy org!

Insite on Mini-Raceday

• Fringe. Last year’s build Bermuda accumulated many rolls, Blind Faith returned for the first time in a few years, and Baltic and Blackbird were very consistent when they rolled. I’ve generally had the least amount to write about them, which just means they are clean and consistent. Top finishers in the All-Gender division on Mini-Raceday.

Bermuda push-off with stlye

• PiKA. Last year, Pi Kappa Alpha had a bit of a challenging 2025 RD season, missing most of the fall and lacking some of the depth in entries we have seen from them in the past. This year looks to change that narrative, as they were present a majority of the days of rolls this fall, and signed up a new veteran driver for Raptor. We hear rumors that the spring we will see the return of another buggy and a new driver, which would be excellent to see that depth returning. Their rolls have been very consistent and quick this semester, and look to be a contender come the spring.

Raptor approaching the chute flag on Oct 25

• Robobuggy. The consistency we see from the Robobuggy team, given they are once again the only autonomous buggy org on the course, is admirable. On weeks when fewer human-driven teams were available, they joined the rolls order and worked their way around the course many times. Towards the later part of the semester, they would commonly stop and jump off the course at the beginning of Hill 3. I confess I’m mostly ignorant of what’s going on inside their buggies. If anyone from the team wants to share and bring some more details to these reports- my DMs are open!

A full roll for NAND back on Sept 13

• SDC. Paranoia has rolled far away the most of anyone on the course this year. Driver Elizabeth has 47 credited trips around the course (11 more than the next highest driver), and many of those were the fastest freeroll times of the day, too. Paranoia is setting a very high bar this year! Their other buggies have looked shakier at times, especially at the turn. Avarice especially had some issues in the chute and has not returned after a crash late in the season.

Paranoia set the standard this semester

• SigEp. After a disappointing end to their 2024 campaign, SigEp was a bit slow to come out in the fall, missing the first few weekends, but returned with Barracuda and their veteran driver. Barracuda has rolled very well so far this year, and their pushers and wheel heaters showed up on Mini-Raceday, winning the Men’s race. We hope to see them contend again come Raceday!

Your fastest Mini-Raceday team!

• SigNu. Sigma Nu was expected to join the rolls order on the last weekend of rolls. Sadly, rain forced that plan to be abandoned, but Bungarus Krait was caped for the Fall so we expect to see them in the Spring!

A RD2025 throwback

• Spirit. Spirit has been consistent these past few years, producing quick rolls and a lot of enthusiasm on the course. Another, more unfortunate, consistency for them from the past few years are occasional issues in the chute. When they hit higher speeds, if the line or conditions aren’t perfect, we’ve seen a fair number of spins or almost-spins. If they can clean that up, their depth can keep them competing at the top level.

Seraph in the chute after Halloween