Does anyone see the resemblance between FIRST & NASCAR (or auto racing in general)? Difference= FIRST is educational.
No, I’m not completely crazy. But come on. We have sponsors like Delphi, Chrysler, GM, FORD, Siemens, Motorola, DuPont… (I’m not going to list them all). We deal in large amounts of money and with the CEO, Presidents etc. of companies. You have your high budgeted teams and low budgeted teams. Your regionals can be like the littler races Atlanta, Richmond, Texas etc. And the Nationals is like the Indy 500 or Daytona, the ultamate dream to win. FIRST is undergrowing tremendous growth as is NASCAR. You know that our BEST days are yet to come. Each day we are getting one step closer to Dean’s ultimate of FIRST becomming a household name.
Dave-O~ who hopes he didn’t look like a COMPLETE idiot because he attempted to say something halfway intelligent.
Hmmm…interesting analogy. You left out that both NASCAR and FIRST have very strict guidelines for the construction of machines their participants use and we both have “pit areas” (though we probably visit our more frequently, unfortunately )
Actually, that is a better analogy than the regular sports team one. Our team has drawn similar parallels (e.g. stickers plastered all over robots, drivers/spotters, pit areas).
I think FIRST is better analogized to NASCAR than sports. You go do your “race”, come back to the pits for any quick motor changes, re-wiring, and back out to race track – er, field – you go.
Although I would say that a FIRST team’s ultimate dream should not be to win, but to apply all examples FIRST provides into the real world. In other words: Reach the level needed to ACHIEVE the chairmans award, but dont do it merely to WIN the chairmans award.
its also similar in that we dont have games like in other sports, we have competitions like they do in nascar, the only difference being that in nascar everyone competes at once but we have individual matches
Last year at Nationals we had 4 or 5 (I can’t even remember. It was all a blur after awhile) matches in a row where we went right back into the line and never back into the pits. Other teams members had to pass us batteries etc. Made for quite a fun time, however exhausting it may have been!
The TechnoKats have an OK relationship with the Delphi Racing people here in Kokomo. The Motorsports department at Delphi has given us some shirts for our team to use during the past two years. We’ve also used the “Delphi Racing” logo on our team shirts.
We would like to have a closer relationship to the Delphi IRL or NASCAR teams in the future, that’s for sure.
I was wandering around Gasoline Alley during a practice day for this year’s Indy 500, imagining Scott Sharp or Mark Dismore (Delphi IRL drivers) driving around our team 45 robot on their down time… this made me realize that “TechnoKart” was not a good name for our robot, if we want to be more closely related to the IRL team (IRL and CART are rivaling factions of open-wheel racing).
*Originally posted by Andy Baker *
**The TechnoKats have an OK relationship with the Delphi Racing people here in Kokomo. The Motorsports department at Delphi has given us some shirts for our team to use during the past two years. We’ve also used the “Delphi Racing” logo on our team shirts.
We would like to have a closer relationship to the Delphi IRL or NASCAR teams in the future, that’s for sure.
I was wandering around Gasoline Alley during a practice day for this year’s Indy 500, imagining Scott Sharp or Mark Dismore (Delphi IRL drivers) driving around our team 45 robot on their down time… this made me realize that “TechnoKart” was not a good name for our robot, if we want to be more closely related to the IRL team (IRL and CART are rivaling factions of open-wheel racing).
Andy B. **
When I first realized that you had named you robot “TechnoKart” I thought, “Why would they name their robot after that other EVIL racing series (CART).” But I then realized it was a lot better name than ours which is “Beefeater” which, for the record, has no afiliation the the alcoholic beverage. Delphi sponsors top teams in both Winston Cup (Hendrick Motorsports) and IRL (Kelly Racing). That’d be really cool if you guys were close to them because if you were I would have to transfer to your team when I graduate.
I ment no offense to supporters of CART. I’m for Tony George and what he has done for drivers in the IRL.
That’d be really cool if you guys were close to them because if you were I would have to transfer to your team when I graduate.
**
Hey, we’ll take ya. You can even sneak up here this year… yeah… the CB team will never know… and you can bring that fancy arm control thingy… yeah, that’s it!
Some of the teams at tis year’s competition used their free time to time themselves stripping their robots down and building them back up. For them there should be an award. The robots weren’t P.O.S. machines, most of them were exceptional. The members of the team were just board I guess. Oh, well. Kudos to them.
C~ya,
Carolyn
Ok so it’s kind of unrelated, but a girl from my team was at the Indy 500 this year and when she got back she emailed my team saying she saw “some guy” in the pits that she knew looked familiar…and then she realized it was Dean. Unfortunately, she didn’t get the chance to say anything to him. But maybe he sees the parallels between the competitions too.
*Originally posted by Janna Hutz *
**Ok so it’s kind of unrelated, but a girl from my team was at the Indy 500 this year and when she got back she emailed my team saying she saw “some guy” in the pits that she knew looked familiar…and then she realized it was Dean. Unfortunately, she didn’t get the chance to say anything to him. But maybe he sees the parallels between the competitions too. **
Dean may have been with J.T. Battenberg III (CEO and President of Delphi Automotive Systems) because he was there. They interviewed him (JT) on TV. Right before they blacked out the race, locally. J.T. is on the FIRST board of directors. So, that may have been the reason that Dean was there.
Dave-O who wishes he could have been there because he has never been to the Indy 500, eventhough he lives in Indianapolis.
**