" Transgressor", S&T Human Powered Vehicle, Takes 2nd Place!

The Miners' newest and sleekest Human Powered Vehicle yet made a strong showing at the ASME competition in Philadelphia Saturday and Sunday.
Team President Whittney Metcalf won the women's sprint race at a blistering 41.8 mph, shattering the old team record of 38.2 mph. Teammate Ben Kettler's 44.6 mph was good for second place, just a half-mile per hour off the mark set by defending national champion Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, and slightly faster than even S&T's now-graduated uber rider Jerrod Bouchard's personal best. Those speeds are a tribute not just to our riders' conditioning but to the engineering skills invested in the vehicle's design. The sprint marks followed an excellent performance in the design competition where the team finished a close second place. The combination of high sprint speeds and an effective sales pitch had the Miners just 6/10th of a point behind Rose-Hulman going into the all-important 65km endurance race, long a S&T specialty. Andrew Sourk said that "the scoring was so close (between S&T and Rose-Huhlman) that whoever won the endurance race would take the overall event".
The highly-trained Miners have a long history of wearing down their opponents in the long race in which they have to change riders every 15-20 laps or so. These rapid driver swaps typically call for NASCAR-style pit-crews precision when (literally) yanking one rider out and dropping in another, but the race configuration didn't play well to S&T power for 2009.
Whittney tells us the Philadelphia road course was "more like a series of drag races" in which two riders paired off in a series of double-elimination, limited-length road races of less than a mile, instead of the grueling lap-after-lap contest of years past. Those unexpected conditions didn't play to Transgressor's strengths of high speed performance because there were more standing starts relative to the distance ridden.
While S&T may have designed a little too close to the edge with a bike that was optimized for the long straightaways of airports and other wider-open spaces of the last two racing seasons, the Lady Miners managed to complete all of their heats while the men had difficulty with a chain-drive system and were unable to cut into RH's lead.
Andrew also reports that "Rose-Hulman certainly earned the victory and our respect, but I am happy with our second-place finish because everyone on the team did their absolute best this year and we learned a lot about refining our designs".

In just two weeks the Rolla designers will relocate nearly 2,900 miles to the ASME West Coast event in Portland, Oregon where they'll again try to break RH's year-long victory streak. They'll send a crew westward on the grueling (scenic) route while the bulk of the team returns to classes, then takes last-minute flights to the event site, races, and flies back so that they can keep up with their GPAs.