The tune-ups ended Saturday, and from here on the Harvard heavyweight crew will see only the best.

The oarsmen traveled to New Jersey this weekend to pick up their 18th straight Compton Cup with a five-second victory over second-place Princeton. Rutgers finished a distant third and MIT a barely visible fourth.

The Crimson and Tigers quickly pulled away from the two lesser squads on Lake Carnegie. Princeton hung tough the entire way, with Harvard having to inch out its little-over-one-length margin of victory. As bow man George Hatch said yesterday, "We didn't blow them out or anything."

The junior varsity boat and coach Ted Washburn's freshmen also scored comfortable victories.

Harry Parker's varsity has now won both of its regular season races (defeating Brown last week) and a pre-season scrimmage over Dartmouth. The preliminaries--the cup races that annually fill the Newell trophy case--are over.

The first serious threat comes next weekend, when a powerful Navy crew visits the Charles for Harvard's only home race of the season. Navy defeated Princeton by ten full seconds earlier this season, illustrating why the Crimson is taking the Midshipmen so seriously.

The following Saturday, May 11, the Crimson will travel to the Eastern Sprints in Worcester. The enormous (in size, not number) Yale eight has won the Sprints two years running, only the second two-year drought for the Crimson since Parker arrived in 1963.

Parker has had the oarsmen working out with a new-fangled, v-shaped, high-in-the-water, but slightly unstable Carbocraft shell during the weekday workouts, but the varsity has yet to abandon the reliable and more stable Schoenbrod model for any races.

The Carbocraft's alignment would shift junior Matt Arrott out of stroke position, where he has been all season. Junior Olympian John MacEachern would move from his number seven seat to the stern.

"We're not rowing technically well enough to go to the Carbocraft yet," Arrott said yesterday, but he expected the varsity would give it a try against Navy.