Re: Rebuild
 

I was a part of the Team 4 One-day Wonder experience in the 2006 GTR where our competition robot did not arrive until Friday from the Los Angeles Regional the prior week. We got a tremendous amount of help from many teams there (45, 188, 217, 1310, 1398, and others) to build an entire robot on Thursday and competed with it on Friday. A team that chooses to rebuild their own robot shouldn't expect that kind of support at a regional.

In Atlanta that same year, the Team 4 students decided to rebuild the competition robot and barely managed to get it done. But the robot didn't move at all in the first match and performed poorly until about the fourth match. By that time, the damage was done and Team 4 did not get selected for the elimination round.

So, there's nothing in the rules against rebuilding a robot, but it might be less than a wonderful experience. I'd stick to minor upgrades and giving the drive team more practice opportunities on Thursday. There's an addage in FIRST: "A good driver will beat a better robot".