All over

5-7-02 All over

Well, that's RW over for another year. I feel relieved, but I can imagine how dissapointing the process must be if you have a spinner or something that can only be used at RW. Anyway, we drove up to Leicester to stay at my Sisters on Wednesday night, (thanks Lisa), and then strolled up the remaining 27 miles after a leisurely breakfast and laze about. the place is a bit of a warren, and very poorly signed inside, it's very much guess the route in... aha a queue of cars in an abandoned airforce base... must be Robot Wars. In fact we pulled up behind Si, Guy and Chris, fellow stout Southerners of team Barberous. We then spent half an hour walking up and down a line of robots peeking at this and that. Once we had a space for unloading, there was the usual rush to get everything out, so we could stand around for hours...bizarre. The scales were weighing under by some 3 kg I reckon... then inside, Photo, Tx check with Val, Drop of a cylinder with fireman Pete, Tech check with Alan Gribble... Then into an intense bout of waiting, and waiting... we had our little chat from Matt Irvine to break up the standing about... then down to some serious hovering, drinking tea, chatting, tea, wee, tea, talk, walk etc... We were sorted in the pits at 12.30, and didn't fight till 7.30. The fight we were originally lined up for was against demolition man (easy), ICU (easy), Barberous (very hard and dangerous)... however we got shunted up, phew I thought, we'll have to wait another hour but at least barberous won't shred us .... the new round was composed of us, Fluffy, with its horrible petrol powered spinning bone, velociripper, an enormous full body spinner and Typhoon, a hugely sponsored air force full body spinner. In the end when we finally got to fight we'd been moved again and faced a beautifully made milled aluminuim lifter called Derek, and a twin rammed flipper called Night raider.... The fight started badly, Night Raider got wedged in the pits, once under way we ripped it's battery lead off and that was the end of it. Then we got stuck into Derek, we shoved him around, but neither of us were really putting on much of a show... We shoved him about, and then he got his lifter tine stuck in the polycarb... couldn't release, and so we ended, us shoving him about, him lifting us to stop it, then not being able to move... Judges decision to Derek, prettier Robot, Adam was hacked off, I was relieved. 175 mile return trip took 2 hours.. you do the maths. Highlight of the day was Adam Clarks 259, a vertical spinner that killed it's opponents in about 30 secs... and got a deserved round of applause.