Is a shifting transmission really necessary?

[Joe Matt]

Sparky has never used a shifting tranny yet, although we have thrown together various ideas and have one in blue sky session.

As a principal of FIRST that has been reiterated again and again by Dean, you DON'T need Andy Bakers or other great engineers to build a robot, so a shifting transmission isn't needed to function in the game. We have never used it and we have won two regionals in our 5 year history, plus we made it to the eliminations in Champs.

As Johnny said before, if you want to do some things, you might want to look at a shifting transmission. Back in 2002 it was a good idea to use one to push around the goals, especially if you were like Sparky 3, MOEhawk, or Beatty that year and wanted to tackle all three at once.