Robot Wars Extreme Warriors 2

Filmed January 2002, Shepperton Studios, London
This competition was essentially for US machines, but Razer was invited along to participate in a US vs UK episode. The four UK teams fought it out head-to-head with the winner to take on one US bot who had qualified in the same way.

Round 1 - vs Kater Killer
We had never met this machine before, it has an axe weapon and so we decided on a close quaters attack. We rapidly gained an advantage, chewing at the wheel arches until we disabled a wheel. Once we were sure we had won the fight we pretty much left them alone - after all this was really a 'friendly'. A win by KO meant that in the next round we faced...

Round 2 - vs Tornado
This was the third meeting of the two machines, and after the way we had trashed them in the All-Stars and Second World Championships they had devised a cunning plan. They made a huge frame, as big as the rules would allow to keep the claw of Razer at bay. On the front of the frame was a 10kg spinning bar. We were impressed with their ingenuity but felt confident of still causing them a great deal of damage.

Fighting commenced and we took them head on, grabbing hold of the spinner and twisting it out of shape. We took a slight lick on one of the wings which left a small hole underneath, but funnily enough it also straightened the wing which had been slightly low before the fight! Both machines were very aggressive, Tornado had the advantage of pushing power but we were causing damage with our crusher. We ripped the motor out of their weapon, bent the frame and also reached in far enough to take a bite out of their chassis. At one pint we lifted them up sideways but were unable to prop them up on the arena side which would have left them immobile. In the last minute of the fight we started running low on battery power and were given quite a push around, but still kept on chewing away. Cease was called and it went to the judges.

Worst Decision Ever?
We were quite shocked when the decision was given to Tornado, given the amount of damage we had inflicted. When we talked to the judges the next day a few things came to light. First of all they had classed the frame on Tornado as sacrificial armour - we felt this to be a totally wrong. Armour is armour, whether it be an extended frame or a sheet of metal. It is all sacrificial as it is there to stop components from being damaged and immobilising the machine. We asked the judges about the damage we had inflicted on Tornado's weapon, they replied, "What weapon?" - they didn't even realise that we had destroyed a potentially nasty spinning bar. They then started to become defensive and said, "well you lost a wheel so that would have made the damage about even". We replied "What wheel?". They had mistaken the motor from Tornado's weapon as one of Razer's wheels. The judges looked rather sheepish at hearing this. Ahh well, we'd had a couple of close ones go our way in the past!