Yes we were banking on it dropping slow enough to "catch it" and power it back up. The fact that we used a 775 meant that we used a 20 to 1 planetary because that was what we had available, IE we had Versaplanetary and a 775 as our best motor that we could easily attach to it. Because of that and a small drum the braking was good enough. I don't know that with the gear reduction needed for a CIM or Mini CIM to still have some speed if it would work good enough. The 775 was definitely warm at the end of a 5min or so "match". Of course the 775 is a fan cooled motor.
You can find our videos at
www.teamredacted.org. From there you can find a link to the Ri3D website where you can find videos from all of those who participated in Ri3D this season.
A mechanical brake would certainly be preferred and if we found the drop rate to be too fast we certainly would have looked at implementing one.