I’m still trying frantically to get things ready for my being away from the family for more than 2 weeks – today that involved getting the dinghy sorted and out of the way (have been doing repairs, and it has been sitting in a very inconvenient place for the duration) and having the brakes on my car serviced since my Mum is coming around to help look after Nora while I’m in Mexico, and she’ll need wheels.
I have also happened to come across ”proof” that there will be a rest day during the comp. If Valle de Bravo lives up to its reputation as the most weather-consistent site on the planet this could be a first in my almost 20 years of comps, and I must say I disagree with the idea!
When I travel halfway around the globe, I do it to fly – and I just KNOW that people will be up there on launch flying no matter if it is a rest day or not! I was thinking; one thing that COULD actually make sense, IF we do fly every day during the upcoming event, would be to throw in a discard. So that if we do get to fly 13 days in a row, pilots get to discard their worst day score.
I know I’m daydreaming here, but just think about it; it is really unlikely that all pilots have the same ”tired day” (day 7 of 13). It is much more likely to see that some pilots are tired after a few days, some more towards the end, and either way they get to discard that one ”tired day” where the whole system just didn’t want to cooperate.
And if this new system takes a bit of the pressure off the racers well then so much the better! It’ll be a safer event overall, with less stress, more smiling faces, more laughs. I base that on the fact that numerically speaking 75 people will come in the bottom half of the scores on day one. This will, for all intents and purposes, exclude these 75 pilots (or more depending on the scoring curve) from any hopes of a decent final result, although the abysimal result could be due to stress, bad form, inca quickstep or any number of other mishaps rather than due to pilot incompetence. So, these 75 pilots will be feeling low but still have to pump up the motivation for 12 days thereafter – maybe they are scoring for their team, maybe they just won’t give up, but at the heart of the matter they’ll be out of the race.
Whereas if there was just one lousy discard (in hopefully 13 days) then that first day of bad luck wouldn’t spell disaster, it would still be possible to hope, it would matter what you did for the rest of the event; the event wouldn’t be over after the first day!
I think I’m making sense here. Just hope some of the CIVL delegates are reading this blog so the discussion may begin before the next big FAI event,
Mads Syndergaard
