Re: Ants. Our original intention was to run ants in exactly the same way as we did at the smash in August- which was a success and provided an excellent balance. However, probably due largely to us, we didnt anticipate the problems that would arise with such a large increase in robots from last year to this year.

I can sympathise with the ants. I spent my first 3 years of robot wars building ants. With that in mind i was fairly keen that ants would not be as sidelined as they traditionally have been. That paid off in August. On Saturday, I was meant to be doing a lot more with the ants than I was able to, due to the unfortunate incident with Jass car giving up the ghost, so I was fairly preoccupied trying to sort out the feathers. After Stu and I discussed the situation over lunch, we decided that, with things quietening down on the feather side, I could spend more time helping with the ants, and we organised some more firm times for antweight battles as Stu mentioned. Thankfully things got going in the afternoon, climaxing in a great final that everyone enjoyed (especially Andrew and Mike driving the antweight tornado and dantomkia against each other :-).

We will be discussing heavily, in our de-brief, how we are going to make ants a much bigger thing (as Jonno has already mentioned). I admit I rather naively hoped that the ants would run as well as they did last year, without so much input from us. But as they say:
Experience is something you dont get until just
after you need it.
Sufficed to say that next year, with such positive feedback from the various people in mayoral bling, we will hope to have an excellent feather and ant competition lined up. With the forthcoming launch of antweight.com- a sister site to featherweights.org- we are moving towards an organisation more representative and embracive of all the smaller weight classes. We have learnt an enormous amount about running events, and thank you all for your feedback- it is invaluable in helping us improve our event formula, and with the experience weve gained over the last 2 events, we are acquiring a fairly sturdy knowledge and experience base which we can build on for future events. As the not-so-great Take-That! once said: Things can only get better!