[Lewis Sussman]

I stand corrected. As I said to my team earlier tonight, "it's not the first time I've had egg on my face." I checked the kickoff video again and indeed, we were told that the metal was above the plastic by an eighth of an inch, plus or minus an eighth. My sincere apologies. It's amazing how we all remembered this incorrectly, right from the beginning. Nonetheless, my plea to FIRST to be clear and consistent about these things remains in full force.

OK, here's a more positive experience from the nationals: As I said in my earlier post, we almost didn't get to play because of a number of difficulties with our machine, one of which was the lack of some proper size timing belts (we brought the wrong sizes with us). We didn't discover this until late Thursday, in the pits, after working all day long, having forfeited all of our practice rounds. At 6:30pm, one of our coaches called a supplier, Command, and the phone was answered by one of their warehouse people, Wayne, on his cellphone, at home mowing the lawn. After hearing that it was for a FIRST team, he offered to go back to the warehouse, a forty five minute drive, to see if he had some in stock. It turned out that he didn't, but then he contacted another company, Dayco, and convinced someone there to go back to their warehouse to see if they had some. They did. Wayne then drove 60 miles each way to drop the belts off at our hotel at about eleven pm on Thursday night. Consequently, we were able to at least play in our matches, which was all we were hoping at this point. Needless to say, this experience made our whole trip worthwhile.