Changing team names is definitely marketing driven. So you have to consider just where you stand now from a marketing perspective.

Do you have an established "Brand"? Is that brand associated with reliable robots that perform well? If so, you probably wouldn't want to mess with it. If your current "brand" is associated with unreliable barely functional robots then a name change might be a very good idea, especially if you have reason to belive you'll do better next in 2002.

Since your team has had three names in three years they probably don't have much brand identity. So it wouldn't hurt too much to change now, unless you did really well last year and want to be remembered.

We've kept the same name for several years now. We find it really helps with recognition. Changing the name of your robot has much less impact on recognition. Of course we tend to use derivatives of the team name for the robot (ie B2K or BeachBot 4.0) so it may not make that much of a difference for us.