Darrell Sapp, Post-Gazette
	Janice Weinberg, who's 4 feet 11 inches and 100 pounds, pushes her buggy for the social group Fringe up the hill on Tech Street.

By Ann Belser
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Janice Weinberg didn't have all of her stuff out of the car when an upperclassman at Carnegie Mellon University approached the arriving freshman and asked her how tall she was and how much she weighed.

The question seemed odd but, by the end of her first week on campus last fall, Ms. Weinberg, 19, of Bala-Cynwyd, Montgomery County, understood.

The answer to the questions -- 4 feet 11 inches and 100 pounds -- made her very popular among upperclassmen who were recruiting buggy drivers for the races during the annual Spring Carnival.

Like other small, slender women arriving at Carnegie Mellon, Ms. Weinberg was taken out to dinner and essentially wooed by teams of mechanics and buggy designers.

	Darrell Sapp, Post-Gazette
	Peter Lynch, of Squirrel Hill gets situated in his buggy and waits for his hatch to be taped shut for the sixth heat Friday morning. He is 5 feet 2 inches and weighs 83 pounds and is the driver for the girls' team buggy from Kappa Kappa Gamma.

The buggy races at Carnegie Mellon started in 1920 and have evolved from the soapbox derby sort of cars to become more aerodynamic, with the drivers riding head first. There is no power to the buggies other than the students who run behind them, pushing them up the hills on the course. The competition is split into two divisions: men's, in which the men push the buggies, and women's, in which the women push. For both of those competitions, the drivers and the rest of the crew can be of either gender.

The sport started as a fraternity race, but now social clubs and one sorority participate. The groups can have multiple buggies or one. The buggies are used year to year, with older buggies used for practice when new buggies are ready to replace them.

On Friday, Ms. Weinberg had her first chance to drive in an actual race, lying face down less than two inches above the ground, heading down Flagstaff Hill head first at about 35 mph.

She made it around the course, coming in with a time of 2 minutes, 24 seconds, 22 hundredths of a second in the women's race. It was fast enough to get her buggy, sponsored by the social group Fringe, into the finals, scheduled for yesterday morning. Those races were cancelled when it started drizzling after the races had been delayed for an hour to give the course a chance to dry.

The cancellation of yesterday's races meant that the times for the preliminary races were the final times.

Ms. Weinberg's race in the women's division left her in sixth place. The fastest time logged in the races Friday was by Abbie Bednar, 21, a junior who drives for the fraternity Pi Kappa Alpha. She crossed the finish line with a time of 2:07:31 around the .83-mile course.

At Carnegie Mellon, the buggy races are "the big event of Spring Carnival and Spring Carnival is the big event of the year," said Edwin Fenton, a professor emeritus of history and the author of a history of the first 100 years of the university.

Mr. Fenton said Ms. Weinberg's experience her first weeks at the university were typical for small women at the school for years. There are a lot of buggies and they need a lot of drivers.

Not every small person on campus has the same experience.

Peter Lynch, 19, a biology major from Squirrel Hill, escaped the courting process that many other drivers had. At 83 pounds and 5 feet 2 inches tall, he was discovered as a coxswain on the school's crew team.

On Friday, as the only male buggy driver in this year's races, Mr. Lynch was piloting Ursula, the buggy made by the school's only women's team, the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority.

He said he was driving because he appreciated the irony of having the only male driver piloting the sorority buggy. He didn't make it to the finals because the buggy fishtailed.. The mechanic for his team, Jaci Feinstein, 22, a senior from Los Altos, Calif., said there was a problem with the axle.

Buggy teams need a variety of talent, much like Formula One racing teams.

In addition to driving the buggies, students design and build them and a whole team of students is needed for each race to provide the muscle.

The pushers are the students who run up the hills, pushing the buggies in the race. Each race has five pushers, which is a subspecialty of its own. Some students practice what is called the bump and run, giving the buggy a big push and then running behind it. Others push with one hand and pump with their other arm as they run. Another group, which is the minority, runs while hanging onto the handle, pushing the buggy in front of them as if it was a low-riding shopping cart.

Jimmy Chow, 22, a senior from Weston, Conn., who is a mechanic for the Fringe team, said driving and pushing are only half the race. The other half is in the design and mechanics of the buggies.

Most of the teams keep their design specifications secret. Most of the trucks in which the buggies are stored on race day have curtains hanging over them to hide the buggies. Drivers get into the buggy out of view. The buggies are then carried onto the course by the team's mechanics. The only time opposing teams can get a look at the buggies is during practice runs, which start in the fall, break for winter and then are held on nights and during weekends in the spring.

Mr. Fenton said secrecy was just another weapon in the competition because teams use different techniques. Some teams, he said, have heaters to keep grease in the bearings at the perfect temperature to provide the least friction. Others don't want other teams to see how their steering is rigged.

Mr. Fenton's history of the sport noted that the buggy races started in 1920. In the early days, the buggies had more car-style designs.

It wasn't until 1953 when the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity came out with a buggy that had a student lying down that the designs shifted. The standard design for the modern buggy has one wheel in the front and two in the rear, but some of the faster buggies reversed that.

Only one student, Adam McCue, 22, of Rochester, N.Y., can look inside every buggy. Mr. McCue, a senior, is chairman of the safety committee. His job is to check the construction of every buggy to make sure it is safe for the drivers.

Mr. McCue has been involved with the buggies since he got to campus.

"Truth be told, if this was a major, I would have graduated long ago," he said.

The rules for the races print out to 150 pages, but Mr. McCue doesn't carry around a thick binder. He has all of the rules loaded into his Palm Pilot.

Keeping the buggy in perfect running order is the obsession of the mechanics.

The mechanics for Fringe went so far as to hold Ms. Weinberg's buggy, with her in it, off the asphalt until moments before the starting gun so it wouldn't get dirty or damaged before the race.

She was driving the team's fastest buggy in the women's race, but not the team's fastest buggy.

That was reserved for the men's races because, as one of the team leaders, Dave Bertucci, 21, a senior from Columbus, Ohio, said, it wouldn't be fair to the men's team if their fastest buggy crashed during the women's race.

As the buggy was carried out, Ms. Weinberg's teammates shouted, "Go Janice." But Ms. Weinberg, in her helmet and goggles, was not to be seen. Her team built the buggy with a tinted windshield to hide its inner workings.