Team Nuts

Team Nuts are a team from Reading that competed in the 2016 series of Robot Wars. The team consists of Rory Mangles, Dave Lawrie, Chris Shakespeare and Alex Shakespeare, who formed the team together after previously competing in live events with their own teams and robots. They reached the second round of the 2016 series with Nuts, which lost all three of its Head-to-Head battles there, although Nuts also competes at live events with reasonable success.

During the 2016 series, the team wore top hats and furry waistcoats, with each member wearing a different coloured waistcoat.

Wins/Losses

 * Wins: 1
 * Losses: 3

Robot Wars Live Events
Prior to its performance in the 2016 series, Nuts made its combat debut at the Robot Wars live events, competing at various Live Tour events with initially limited success.

Alex Shakespeare also fought at the 2015 Robot Wars World Championship with AAK (An Adorable Kitten), also with limited success. AAK fought TR2 and ThunderChild in its first round battle, but failed to move at all after blowing a fuse, and was eventually flipped out of the arena by TR2. It also fought in a six-way melee with Behemoth, Ripper, Luzifer, Weird mAlice and Meggamouse, but was eliminated early on after getting flipped onto its back by Meggamouse and being left unable to self-right. Ripper would ultimately win the melee on a judges’ decision.

Other Robots
Before they formed Team Nuts for the 2016 series of Robot Wars, team members Rory Mangles, Dave Lawrie, Chris Shakespeare & Alex Shakespeare had their own teams and fought with their own robots in the live events held during the show’s 12-year hiatus. While Rory Mangles was the original builder of Nuts, he has also built various other robots which regularly appear at live events. These include Richie, a black featherweight armed with an electric lifter with two-front mounted spears, and a variety of robots in smaller weight classes. Mangles also produces NanoTwo kits for roboteers competing in the antweight and fleaweight categories. These comprise of a set of NanoTwo ESCs, motors and wheels, as well as options for extra components and a version specially adapted to comply with fleaweight rules.

Dave Lawrie fought with his own team under the name Team Die Gracefully Robotics (also shortened to Team DGR) and has been fighting since 2007. Many of his heavyweights he had built for the live events were designed to be basic in order to stand out from more modern flipper-wielding robots such as Iron-Awe 5. In 2007, he built his first robot called Monolith, a green wooden wedge-shaped robot, and later helped build Cabrakan, a two-wheeled robot armed with a stabbing chisel which was built as a joint project between Team DGR, Team Godzilla and Team Hell for the 2009 UK Championships. In 2010, Lawrie built Anger for the UK Championships which was armed with a front wedge, and for the 2011 UK Championships held at the O2 Arena, London, he built Wilhelm's Scream, a red and green box-shaped robot running on two wheels. During the events, Dave Lawrie has also fought with various featherweights such as Hoodrat, Canary Wharfare, Goon, Japanese Fighting Tortoise and TW3-RX5. He also frequently fought in the antweight class with several antweight robots, often entering as a completely new team for every event, although he has since retired from competing in this category.

Chris Shakespeare has fought under the team names of Team JACKLS and Team Shakesc in both the featherweight and antweight categories. Chris was the builder of the featherweights Spur, Spur 2 (both four-wheel drive rammers), Olaf (a two-wheel drive rammer originally armed with a lifter) and an unnamed robot with an electric axe. He has fought in several Antweight World Series events, with notable antweight robots including Flint, Fantric and Formic, among several others.

Custom Antweights
Since 2014, team member Alex Shakespeare has also built and sold numerous custom antweight robots under the Team Shakey name, to fund construction and repairs to his own featherweight and antweight machines. These antweights are fully compliant with AWS regulations, and range from bespoke robots built to specifications set out by the customer to miniature replicas of heavyweight competitors.