Congratulations to:
– Vice President – Lewis Rockwell
– Treasurer – Guillermo Gomez
– Broadcast Chair – Mark Estes
– Communications Chair – Cynthia Xu
– Rolls Reporter – James Wong
– Teams Liaison – Diya Nuxoll

In addition, we have also received interested candidates for our open events chair position, which will be announced in the coming weeks.

Thank you again for everyone who ran in the elections and those who voted this year! The BAA greatly appreciates your support and participation.

cmubuggy.org/vote

It’s once again that time of year: time to make your voice heard for BAA officer and committee chair elections!

Voting will be open from Friday, May 15th through Friday, May 22nd. Only current BAA members may vote, so make sure to check your membership status to ensure your vote is eligible! Each race requires 25 votes to be finalized, so every vote counts. If you do not see your name on the member roll and believe this is an error, please contact Jeremy and Sam with your latest donation receipt. If you have not renewed your membership this school year, you have until May 22nd to do so.

All of our races are uncontested this cycle. The candidates are as follows:

Vice President – Lewis Rockwell
Treasurer – Guillermo Gomez
Broadcast Chair – Mark Estes
Communications Chair – Cynthia Xu
Rolls Reporter – James Wong
Teams Liaison – Diya Nuxoll

Candidate statements can be found in the ballot form.

Thank you for your continued support for the buggy community!

Please nominate any eligible candidates who you think would do a good job. In particular, we need candidates for Broadcast Chair and Events Chair.

Nominees will have until May 12th to accept their nomination. This year’s election administrators are Jeremy Tuttle and Sam Connor and can be contacted through the BAA Discord. Nominees are invited to contact the current election administrators and current board members if they have questions about the duties of a position.

The BAA board holds monthly meetings throughout the year, with increased frequency around Carnival. As an officer, attendance is not mandatory at every meeting so long as you continue to make an effort to support the mission and projects of the BAA and ensure that the duties of your position are fulfilled.

BAA election procedures and eligibility requirements are described in the Bylaws and Constitution.

Firstly, we’d like to shout out all of our wonderful volunteers. Whether it be timing, tabling, commentating, or anything in between, you all were an integral part of making Raceday 2026 happen. We hope that each one of you knows how much the BAA and the buggy community as a whole appreciate your time and dedication.

Full Raceday 2026 results are now up on our website, and a full recording of the awards ceremony (both Buggy and Booth) can be found on our YouTube channel! We’d like to extend a huge congratulations to all of our trophy- and award-winners this year . Our YouTube channel also has the full Raceday 2026 livestreams. Stay tuned in to our Instagram, Facebook page and our YouTube channel for more photos and videos of individual heats, which will be published once they’ve been processed!

Raceday 2026 photos have also been uploaded to our photo gallery ! If you took photos at Raceday and would like to contribute to our gallery, please refer to the links publicized in our Discord (Join our discord!) or contact data (at) cmubuggy.org.

Once again, thank you to everyone—students, alumni, volunteers, parents, and fans alike—for your continued support of Buggy. We hope that you all enjoyed Raceday 2026 as much as we did and that you all are just as excited as us for the next year of Buggy!

The Raceday 2026 Prelims Lead Truck Auction is now live! Please read the terms on the auction site, especially the bold print, to ensure you are able to claim your hard-fought lead truck seat. Auctions close at 9PM Thursday, so be sure to distract your friends at our Happy Hour at Cappy’s so you can outbid them.

The auction for Finals seats, including the All-Gender races, will take place live and in-person, immediately following the History of Buggy, at 5PM Friday at the CUC brown chairs.

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!

Thanks to all the rolls reporting contributors over the semester!!

What’s up, Buggy fans. Welcome to the first taste of the softest, slowest, weakest pillow fight of a Raceday in recent memory. After last year’s “race” was pushed a week past Carnival due to the wrath of Pittsburgh weather, you’d think teams would be ready to go (or at least attempt to roll during Spring Break and Truck Weekend). Instead, top to bottom, the buggies are rolling as if they have their disappointed alumni’s hopes and dreams dragging behind them through the chute. Practices seem to constantly come to a stop, hatches are falling off left and right, pushers are tripping and stumbling all over the course like Fergie in 2006, the Greeks spent more time practicing their picket lines than their hill transitions, and Sweepstakes has decided to coddle the teams by replacing most DQs with 6-second time penalties. Apparently, when they triple the number of people in charge, nobody is left with the spine to actually enforce the rules. I’d hand out my own DQs for sheer mediocrity, but frankly, this field isn’t even worth the paperwork.

Fringe is desperately searching for new ways to stay relevant after losing their one claim to fame: a quarter-century of top three Design Comp finishes that vanished the moment they forced SDC to participate. To compensate, they mimicked their adversary’s approach and spent the year building a massive wooden monstrosity on wheels that looks more like their lackluster booths than a buggy. In a damning indictment of Sweepstakes’ bloated safety committee, this lumbering splinter-factory managed to pass capes. It’s honestly a shame that the buggy wasn’t allowed to race, because it would likely outroll half of their active fleet.

Not to be outdone in the bizarre side-quest department, Apex has decided to race with the robots after accepting that the All-Gender race is no longer the easy win it was years ago, and their podium hopes have been extinguished. When they can’t out-push or out-build the human teams, surrendering to the singularity and rolling a Roomba is the only logical next step. Their new buggy, Kerosene (named after the multitude of times their mechanics have almost burned down Gesling Stadium), has a vibrant oil-slick paint job that spectators will get to admire for an extra long time as it dawdles through the chute turn.

It has become clear that over in the Greek quad, minimal effort is a way of life. SAE made it out for the first time two weeks before raceday, with most assuming that their chapter had been kicked off campus again. SigNu also didn’t make it to the course until recently because, unsurprisingly, members of the Zoo have a serious lack of game and are incapable of recruiting a female driver. Right now, their only real sign of life is their alumni clogging up Discord chats.

PiKA has spent years flirting with organizational collapse, and there are no signs of that changing anytime soon. To kick off the year, they handed the leadership reins to a Freshman whose family history on the course is already a safety hazard. To spike their aging alumni base’s cortisol even more, the brothers have found new ‘safety liaisons’ to lubricate their operations both on and off the course. Still stuck with only their biggest, slowest tank of a buggy that is now old enough to drive itself to the starting line, the brothers have resorted to pulling another rusty buggy out of an alumnus’ garage, and even then, they haven’t managed to restore it to a rollable state. It’s the exact kind of low-effort disarray that we’ve come to expect from the S.L.A.G.s.

Spirit and SigNu were the only teams to vote against the new 6-second penalty rules, entirely because their only path to a trophy relies on the good teams getting DQed. Spirit continues their tendency to do ballet in the chute whenever they go fast, and there are no signs of stopping. They might be the two-time defending champions of the People’s Choice Award, but their people clearly don’t care about making it to the finish line.

Delta Gamma has finally graduated from Fringe’s dumpster, rolling out a new build that they claim is pretty quick: shocking, coming from a team whose mascot is literally designed to sink. That’s an impressive feat, but they also special-ordered glamorous, glittery pink wheels that don’t fit in either of their buggies. It’s exactly what you would expect from DG: they finally have a buggy that can compete, they just can’t figure out how to put the shoes on without a matching handbag.

SigEp has firmly established themselves as contenders, though it’s a shame that their sportsmanship, ability to follow rules, and basic moral fiber haven’t kept pace. After years of irrelevance, incompetence, and DQing half or more of their entries, they finally found some speed. However, that speed doesn’t mean anything when they drive off their whole women’s team and get DQ’d for having a few confused brothers run alongside their pusher. Maybe they should review the rules before Raceday instead of throwing a house-wide temper tantrum after they get caught pacing half a dozen times in a single heat. What about this rule is so hard to follow? Just do what SigNu does and don’t have anyone show up to support the team. This way, there is nobody to pace with their pushers. We’ll see if SigEp’s strategy will continue to be holding their driver’s hand through the entire course, because apparently, following the rules is a bridge too far for their collective IQ.

CIA looks less like a defending champion and more like a Berlin U-Bahn trainwreck. For a team that usually follows a yearly build cycle like a religious obligation, the silence coming from their shop is deafening. With no new buggy, no decent pusher in sight, and freeroll times consistently slower than Apex, it’s no wonder that half their freshman class is quitting the team to go somewhere else. The only “Involvement” left in CIA comes from a group of alumni who, in a blatant violation of the rules, spend the days before Raceday clogging up the basement of a freshman dormitory surrounded by flammable chemicals and ball bearings like they’re back in the 70s. One has to wonder if Sweepstakes will finally find the gumption to disqualify them for this illegal meddling, because, fortunately for CIA, a little bit of cheating might be all it takes for them to keep up with the competition this year.

SDC used to be the most hated, secretive, and genuinely mean team on the course, and I almost miss it. They’ve become the very thing they used to hate: a bloated, bureaucratic mess that cares more about preaching safety than rolling fast, which is hilariously hypocritical when they consistently crash their buggies more than any other team. They even offer to publicize their supposedly superior safety technology, which is rich considering they “forgot” to bring their steering to last year’s Design Comp. Now, they’re struggling to finish a new build and are rolling on dated wheels that are worse than the rest of the field. While their fastest two buggies are still setting the pace, that advantage is as water-soluble as their egos.

And that, Buggy fans, is your definitive look at Raceday 2026. It may be a slow year, but it’ll likely be a close one. AEPi and Atlas are likely gone for good, the All-Gender course record is still slower than the Women’s course record, and I need a drink. I can’t wait to see this year’s races, but you’ll never meet me.

Men’s:

1. SDC A
2. SigEp B
3. CIA A
4. SDC B
5. CIA B
6. PiKA A
7. “Honorable” Mention: SigEp A (pacing: 24 second penalty, unsportsmanlike conduct: DQ)

Women’s:

1. CIA A
2. SDC A
3. CIA B
4. SDC B
5. DG A
6. CIA C

All-Gender

1. SigEp’s pacers, winning the race unintentionally.
2. The circumcised remains of Starling’s pushbar.
3. SAE, apparently?
4. Bractor, fueled by unadulterated hubris and a complete disregard for the laws of physics.
5. A 1988 Spirit alumnus, who still thinks he can run a 14-second H5 if he had the right orthopedic inserts.
6. Road rash, the must-have accessory for this year’s pushers.

The Field

Apex – “I’m not like other girls” isn’t a buggy award
CIA – The dog that caught the car realized it doesn’t know how to drive
DG – They’re called brakes, not breaks
Fringe – Locally sourced, artisanal, and 100% organic failure
PiKA – You’d go faster if your pushers didn’t show up wearing your driver’s clothes
SAE – Wait a minute… who are you?
SDC – The only thing more intimidating than your pushers is a light drizzle
SigEp – The rules are easy to follow if you’d just learn how to read!
SigNu – Too bad your alumni can’t build pushers and drivers for you
Spirit – At least your T-shirts look nice?
Robobuggy – Error 404: competition detected; initiating emergency shutdown
Sweepstakes – Too many cooks in the kitchen

Photos: Saturday Gallery (upload) / Sunday Gallery (upload)

General Observations:

Team Observations:

Lastly, Truck Weekend is coming up in a few days! If you are coming out please let me know! We would love a little help timing. If you can help take pictures or take notes, sign-up here, or just show up! That sheet also has links to upload photos (updated every week). Let us know if you upload photos so we can give you credit (DM Barsham or data at cmubuggy dot org). You can always send notes or corrections to me by email (danbecerra at cmubuggy dot org) or on discord (@.dbec).

Thanks to James, Rob, Jazz, Connor and Guillermo for contributions this week!