[zinthorne]

Being a driver this year and having talked to many others, and having competed within my team to drive, I believe that there is so much more to being a driver than being able to drive an obstacle course. It took me half of a competition to get "good" at driving our robot. A driver must be able to think on his feet and be able to adjust to the situation or if something goes wrong. My coach trusted me alot this season and didn't give me much help. (This was because she was going to tell other teams what to do) Overall this worked well and we did pretty good.
Going back to what someone else said about using a kit bot and putting the best drivers on it to see who is best, is a flawed idea. First most drivers that are ver good have huge amounts of driving on their robots before competition. Then they also drive in many competitions, and over the course of many years. Think of it like this, your could take the driver from 254 and then the driver from 16 and switch the robots for each. Neither driver would do well, because one may have never driven a swerve drive, and one not driven a WCD.

One idea that I would like to see at championships is a robot driving test. This could be open to drivers who want to drive different drive trains and test other robots, as well as spectators if teams allowed. For example many top teams have two robots. Several of those teams could bring those to championships and let people drive them around. It would allow other drivers to test their skills on a different robot, as well as see what they like, and let their teams look into new designs. It would also make it fun for spectators, because they could drive and look at closely the robots that they just saw on the field.