TORNADO - The Team with the Comedy Flying Cow
ROBOTS @WAR 2001

This event marked a full year of Tornado running competitively - last year's Robots@War was our debut. We were not expecting to be able to attend, given that this event coincided with the filming of Robot Wars Extreme at Earls Court, but Mentorn not requiring us to fight on the Saturday made it possible.

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Mentorn had been making a bit of a hash up of the Extreme filming, so we were out for a fun and relaxing day after all the hassle Extreme had been so far. What a contrast the atmosphere at Wilsons Day was! We were running the charity event weapon pushing blade built earlier in the year, and our spare (old Series 4) armour, but with everything else as we had been using at Earls Court. This included running the Kiel batteries, and wet tyres (we would have preferred slicks for the tarmac surface), however we hadn't had a chance to do any testing.



Above 4 pictures courtesy of Don Kwast/Enderbot

Our first fight was against Bigger Brother. Unfortunately we found that we had wired one of the motors the wrong way round, so throttle was on the steering control and steering on the throttle, making Tornado very hard to drive! Unsurprisingly we lost - Bigger Brother threw us up onto the tyres at the side of the arena, and there was nothing we could do about it!


Above 2 pictures courtesy of Gary Mc Nally/Anarchybot

So for the rest of the day we fought just display battles. The first was against an old hovercraft (school CDT project) which we pushed around convincingly.


Above picture courtesy of Gary Mc Nally/Anarchybot

The second display was against Arnold, Arnold Terminegger whom we let demonstrate their lifter, self righter and axe against us, in between us pushing them about. The crowd (and ourselves) gave the battle to AAT.

This event was the first time we have seen Anthrax run - and it was funny! In their first fight against Axe Awe, they stopped after going just a few feet - their receiver batteries had fallen out. In their second (a demonstration against the hovercraft) they hit it a few times (without pushing it), and then went whizzing off backwards into the barrier out of control. Their software failsafes had failed, apparently! Ed and Andy were present with Storm, although it only ran once, and Dominator 2 had an interesting failure, which was dealt with very efficiently by the team with help from Ian Watts and Bigger Brother. See the Wilsons 2001 entry on the Storm page for more information. We were able to meet lots of names from the forum and finally put faces to them - notably "Hi" to the Robot Widows and Team Geeza. We left before the end of the day to get back to Earls Court.

Sorry for the lack of photos, we weren't prepared with cameras etc as we weren't expecting to be there - so if anyone has any video or photos of us (especially of the fight against Arnold, Arnold Terminegger), and would be happy for us to put them here, then get in touch!

Have a look at the official Robots@War site.

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