Thrills and spills in Formula Pi Finals

Last night's Formula Pi Grand Final certainly did not disappoint! With five such strong competitors making the final, the race set itself up to be a tight race to the finish line.

If you don't want to know what happened, catch up with the racing below before reading further. The B-final starts at 8:26 and the A-final starts at 26:54

The B-final was a great showing of how good racing has been this season, it could've been an A-final in any previous season. Comeback of the night has to go to lambda.q.racing who spent a lot of the race stuck on their side on two wheels spinning perilously on the entrance to the S's. Despite this, they managed to claw back enough laps to almost pip Makespace Randers into second place! The B-final win was given to Team Limilo who stretched out a commanding lead after Makespace Randers stopped early.

The A-final stacked up to be one of the best races we've had in a long time in Formula Pi. All five robots confirmed their spot in the final with one round still left to race, with a two-time champion and four first time finalists, it was easy to assume that the champion would reign supreme but it wasn't that simple.

All five robots got off the line cleanly, with two-time champions lambda.p.racing making an early break for the S's. We thought that we'd be settling into a fairly routine display of dominance from lambda.p.racing as they stretched to a 3 lap lead, but as with racing everywhere upsets can and do happen! Chitty Chitty Pi Pi struggled in the early stages of the final to get going, but on lap 12 lambda.p.racing collided with Chitty Chitty Pi Pi causing them to flip. Their code was not as strong when the robot was upside down compared to when it was the right way up, and within 6 laps Whacky Racer and Team Yoshi had closed the gap.

For the final three minutes it was difficult to work out who was going to win and the lead changed between Team Yoshi, lambda.p.racing and Whacky Racer and it really was anyone's race for the taking, but after Whacky Racer got stuck on the wall and flipped over a few times they dropped away leaving Team Yoshi and lambda.p.racing to race to the line. After a tense final few laps, Team Yoshi snuck half a lap ahead of lambda.p.racing and kept hold of the lead to the finish line.

A-Final results:

B-Final results: