The weather in the afternoon was crappy and wet, and attendance was significantly less than last year. Teams represented included Mortis, Chaos 2, The Alien, Kan Opener, Anarchy, Lazerus, Skeletron, Barberous, Storm, Plunderbird, Steel Avenger, and Savage Toaster. Robots present included Roshambot, Behemoth, Onslaught, Shredder, Beta, KingB5, Draven, Stinger, Excecutioner, and of course Tornado, but it's likely many stayed hidden in cars due to the weather. There were a few an antweights and rc cars but not as many as normal. A few more interesting cars turned up (although most stayed away from the arena in the overflow the car park) Martin's Delorean, Chris's Punto GT, 2 scoobys, a Boxter, a Skyline (not Si's), a few Land Rovers, and Eddy's S2000.

We missed most of the robots running - we ate lunch in the pub, and it took absolutely ages for our food to arrive... We ran Tornado once when the rain eased off for a while, against KingB5 who put its spikes through our scoup but then lost a drive chain itself. We performed a burnout, producing lots of steam from the wet wheels... Then Shredder joined the arena, and a little "fight" ensued, nothing major as we had be running for nearly 10 minutes and our batteries were dead! It was a very blooming wet afternoon, and we put Tornado away as it started to rain again. So much for the boot sale - everything people had to sell stayed hidden away in their cars!

As it got dark, and the rain eased off again, John Reid organised a demo of his Battlebots machine Beta, tying it down onto a wooden frame held down with two large water drums. Beta flattened a computer monitor, and an old microwave (yes, one that Dave had already robbed for its transformer...)

After this, Dave set up his Tesla Coil. It was properly dark by now, and it added to the effect. Dave brought out a new innovation, a tower of AOL CDs, which the coil destroyed in spectacular fashion...

The evening was spent in the usual way, with a buffet meal in the restaurant. The food wasn't too special, mainly because the plates were stone cold by the time we got to the food, but at least the waitressing met the usual high standard :)

Martin had got hold of a preview tape of Mechanoids footage, which everyone sat down to watch. It was roughly cut, with little continuity and a lot of digital compression - even so, I wasn't too sure, I think you had to have been there... Most of the evening was spent chatting, and a few radio controlled toys appeared - a tank from Stephen, and a Biohazard toy from John Reid.

We left fairly early (although quite a lot of people were doing so). It was the usual mad drive back - despite 200kgs of batteries, plus a load of other bits weighing down my little one litre Uno, I still left Dave (2 litre Turbo Xantia) and Chris (Punto GT) behind...