Our opponent was a spinner, so our strategy was to use our speed to fly across the arena and hit our opponent before he could spin up. We chose to use our wedge weapon configuration in order to flip our opponent.

Unfortunately, the wedge was a last minute build and had never been tested. The battlebox lights went to green; Paydar flew across the arena towards the opponent, and missed. We went into the wall hard. We did manage to break at least one of the spikes and dent a section of arena, but the untested wedge had bent under the robot, lifting our steering wheel off the ground.

With no steering, we still attempted to fight, mostly running into the wall. Finally the wedge failed again, as we managed to impale ourselves on one of the spikes on the wall. One small point of pride is that even with no steering and a massively increased friction from the bent wedge, Paydar was still generating enough momentum to impale itself so thoroughly that our entire group plus stagehands were unable to pull it off the wall, and a crowbar was needed.

In the end we came away with two important lessons. One, always test everything—there is no such thing as “strong enough”. Two, driving is critical. The champions get by more on their driving ability than the strength of their bot.