[Chris]

Team 151 used a direct drive van door motor set up. We went for all torque and little speed. The gamble proved good at The UTC regional where we were the only team to successfully pull a fully loaded stretcher, and we seeded our way into the finals at a respectable 8 out of 51. However the gamble didn't pay off at nationals where we couldn't achieve high enough scores (due to no time multipliers) to run with the "big dogs" and seeded a respectable 48 out of 81 in the Acrhimedies division, and didn't make the finals. Once again however our high torque proved very useful at BattleCry at WPI where we were able to "steal" goals from some teams due to our high power.
We have already decided that more speed is essential next year.

On the drill motor front I know some teams who used them this year did very well in the traction department, because their grabbing mechanism transferred the weight of the goal onto their drive-train thus putting more weight on their wheels giving them better traction. For example I know the killer bees (33) and Tesla (95) used this approach.

Chris Team 151
http://team151.tripod.com