Those papers reference a collision attack, which is not the same thing as the point of this contest. The papers describe ways to generate pairs of messages that will hash to the same value.
The contest describes a preimage attack, where one has a hash value and must guess an input which would have generated that hash. SHA-1 has no known preimage vulnerabilities, so the contest winner will either have to be lucky or break SHA-1.
The best advice would probably be to iterate the keyspace in a novel way and hope you happen upon a good match that someone else doesn't get.
The contest describes a preimage attack, where one has a hash value and must guess an input which would have generated that hash. SHA-1 has no known preimage vulnerabilities, so the contest winner will either have to be lucky or break SHA-1.
The best advice would probably be to iterate the keyspace in a novel way and hope you happen upon a good match that someone else doesn't get.