Does USA need a Club Class?

If your premise is 'you can never properly handicap
such
a field' then you needn't say any more. No handicap
system will satisfy you.

Personally, I like the handicapping system, but think
it doesn't give enough distinction to discourage those
flying higher performance aircraft. I don't see 2-33s
or L-13s or PW-2s entered in the Sports Class. They
have no class to compete in, because the handicaps
need to be further apart.

If we want to see newbies REALLY encouraged to race,
we should REALLY encourage low performance aircraft.
Something you can just barely do a silver badge in
comfortably...

The only reason the 15meter, 18meter, standard and
world class guys don't win Sports class instead is
pride.
If you cancelled all the other classes at the last
second at some contest, the Nimbus would top the Sport's
class leader board...

At 23:00 04 April 2005, Tim Mara wrote:
the problem with this handicapping is that you still
have PW5's and Nimbus's
in the same class......you can never properly handicap
such a
field......and, there already is a class for the PW5
(World class) and one
for the Nimbus (Open class) and 126's have their own
class too.....
a small restriction to who can fly what will go a long
way towards allowing
everyone to fly a 100K, 200K or 300K on the same day....and,
like the FAI
classes, even see another glider during the day. Not
simply fly alone and to
wherever and have no clue how they are doing, or learn
by following others
of 'like' performance
tim
'M B' wrote in message
...
I recommended that the CH handicaps simply
be squared for Sports class.

The PW-2 with 2.15 becomes 4.62
The Nimbus 3DM with .75 becomes .56

1-26 1.62 2.62
2-33 1.84 3.38
L-13 1.46 2.13
G103 1.15 1.32
ASW20 0.90 0.81

So the Nimbus would need to go 8.2 times faster (or
further or whatever) to beat the PW-2 driver.

This would favor the lower performance ships. Really,
isn't the importance of Sports Class to make it distinct?
I think squaring the handicap would make it much more
insteresting and distinct.

And the PW-2 guy doing a 30km task vs. the Nimbus
guy
with
a 250km task sounds like a real race to me!

And a 2-33 vs an ASW-20 SHOULD get about a 4:1 advantage,
instead of a 2:1 advantage.

I'd like to see this scoring at our fun meet coming
up...

As far as the other classes, I'm not sure how the
'standard' class has lived so long. Also, every contest
seems to be a 'seniors' contest anyway, so dunno about
that
one :P

A 2-place contest class? Sports and open-unlimited
should be enough for this.

Finally, who cares about motorglider class? For the
flying portion of the contest, isn't it just the 'fixed
ballast' class?
These guys say 'it's just a glider' so I'd like to
see it just treated that way. I'm aware of the subtlety
of 'landouts' but I
think there is an elegant way to even the playing
field
for this
(some penalty for landout, doubled for engine use).

So those are four I'm not so sure about.

Sports, 15 meter, and open-unlimited seem to be the
three
real viable ones. With the squared handicap, lowest
performers
will tend to Sports, the tilters and flappers that
qualify will
go 15-meter, and the sexy big glass in open.

I think every successful multiclass contest has at
least two of these three classes, right? The rest
seem to be very 'specialty' classes. Nothing wrong
with that, except it gets a little harder to get throngs
motivated for so many 'class' competitions

At 17:00 04 April 2005, wrote:

Tim Mara wrote:
we don't need another class...we just need to fix
the one we
have.....

I proposed years ago that we modify the Sports class
'more or less'
to the
very successful European Club Class (they actually
have two versions
there
for standard class gliders and 15 meter gliders called
the 'racing
class)
My (and others) suggestion was to eliminate gliders
from the Sports
class
that already had a 'competitive' class of their own....
Doing this I suggested the sports class would 'disallow'
any 'current

production' competition glider or variation thereof,
from Sports
class
competition.
Meaning..if you have a 'racing' glider that is of
a series currently
being
produced you'd have to fly it in the respective class
it was designed
for
(15M, Standard, open and yes, world class) . If you
have a glider
that has
been surpassed by more competitive models from the
manufacturer,then
it
could be handicapped and allowed into sports class...
The main idea
with
this was to allow closer handicapping and allow older
gliders (lower
cost)
to fly with their pilots competitively and let them
fly in called
tasks
rather than having to design new scoring systems to
meet the broadest
array
of handicaps.
The other change to sports class I suggested was that
no one would be

allowed to fly in a sports class 'National' contest,
that had not
participated in a Sports class regional contest within
the preceding
3
years, thus keeping the class 'pure' .....since it
seems pilots who
otherwise snub their noses at sports class seem to
rush top attend
only when
there is a title at stake....and then of course as
we see it today,
show up
in droves to fly their latest ship...
I never got any flack from these proposals except
of course from
those who
were already fling the latest and greatest ships......but
even most
of them
admitted in the past it would be beneficial to promoting
the sports
class
and would allow owners on lesser budgets with older
gliders a place
to
compete where they could more or less evenly match
themselves and
their
ships and bring more into the sport or glider racing..which
can't be
bad for
any of us...
anyway.my 2c are there again.....
tim

--
Wings & Wheels
www.wingsandwheels.com


Can't argue with any of that, Tim, but where are you
going to draw the
line? The V1's and 20's are still quite potent machines.
How about the
Genesis, its out of production. I do like your proposal
to only allow
real sports pilots to compete, but then it wouldn't
be all that hard to
log a sports regionals every 3 years just to keep ones
options open.
What I see is a lot of local pilots will fly sports
nats when they are
close and the other nationals when they are close.
That's what I do and
kind-a like it that way.

JJ


Mark J. Boyd





Mark J. Boyd