On Tuesday, February 6, 2018 at 5:30:12 PM UTC, Jim White wrote:
I have bailed out of the hard deck thread as I think that all opinions have
been aired once or maybe twice!

The hard deck discussion started out following the dreadful accident in
Chile and was an attempt to discuss making all competition safer.

However, when I think around the subject, isn't the real issue about the
use of the SGP format?

We have adopted and developed SGP in order to make the sport more exciting.
Not just for pilots but also the wider public who may find the racing more
interesting and might be encouraged to enter our sport.

I suggest that by doing SGP racing we have also made racing less safe
because the format fundamentally changes the risk / reward balance.

In normal racing if you were 3 minutes behind the leader you came in with
980 points instead of 1000 and could catch up the next day. In SGP 3
minutes could well mean 0 points and you are out of the game.

The question I raise is this: have we made gliding less safe by making it
more exciting, or have we made gliding more exciting by deciding to make it
less safe??

Anyone remember the 1975 film Rollerball?

Back in the late 80s I wrote a letter to Sailplane and Gliding advocating an F1 GP style glider racing format with what (IIRC) I referred to as "placing points" instead of the 1000 point system. The major point I emphasised at the time was that the distribution of points did not have to follow the then used F1 scheme of 10,8,9,7 etc. The choice of point distribution could have a powerful effect on the nature of the competition; in a field of 20 competitors, at one extreme, giving 100 points for a win and one less for every place thereafter would make for a very noncompetitive atmosphere whereas towards the other extreme 10,8,9,7,6,4,3,2,1 would make for an extreme competition at the top end and little reward or incentive at the other end. F1 figured have since then tailored their points to affect the result/reward incentive.

(A very eminent competition pilot was given right of reply and kindly explained why GP style flying was not a good idea.)

I have greatly enjoyed watching the GP series over the years but when it was introduced I was surprised at the points distribution chosen and am even more surprised that it hasn't been modified to reduce the incentive to risky flying at the top end increase both the reward and the discrimination of skill level at the lower end.