HighPlains
Posts: 2662
Joined: 3/2/2003
From: Over da rainbow,
KS, USA
Status: offline
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I find it amazing to read all these posts about how hard it is to fly a 424 quickie. They have a wing loading that is lower than almost any trainer on the market today, so the complaint is what? They go too fast? If that is the case, a simple prop change or the throttle is available to slow it down. It is true that dead stick landings are slightly more difficult, but with that throttle you don't have to kill the engine until you are over the runway.
I will also admit that a quickie in full race trim is harder to control than the typical sport model for the beginning racer. And the advice you will read in most posts only tells how it works in full race trim and how to set it up. BUT here is a little secret about setting up a quickie - balance it so that it is NOSE HEAVY so that it takes more elevator throw and it becomes much more like the typical sport model. With it set up nose heavy, you decrease the sensitivity of the elevator so that you will now need twice or three times as much throw to do the same radius turn in the air. This will also slow the airplane slightly, but it makes the landing much more predicable. In full race trim, a quickie is almost a free flight model because if you bounce a landing, you no longer have the elevator throw to counteract the bad landing bounce.
I have long thought that there needed to be a better way of operating a race. The current method of scoring a race originated about 40 years ago. And frankly, it works fine for the experts at the top, though with a bit of luck they sometimes have a lot of easy races. An easy race is one where someone can lap the rest of the field. This inflates the expert’s score, while it tends to discourage the new guys that are being blown by. I think that everybody would agree that racing is the most fun when it is “wingtip to wingtip”. Perhaps it is time to examine a new way to organize a race, by stratifying the contestants by skill level, equipment and heat time.
By stratifying the race entrants by time, you would be flying against others with equal skills. Equipment requirements would no longer matter as much, so you can buy and compete at the level you are comfortable with. Say you have 20 contestants at a race. You already have a pretty good idea who is very fast, and who is still learning. So you set the matrix up with the expected fastest four in heat A, the next four in heat B, and so on to the bottom. Fly the heats. If you win your heat, you move up to the letter heat above. Come in last in your heat, and you drop a letter for the next round. In effect, each round of heats sorts out the entire group. At some point in the day, you fly the last round, without the contest management telling the competitors that it is the last one. Each heat winner of that one round are given the respective trophy for the A, B, C…to the bottom.
Other advantages? Each heat remains at 4 planes throughout the contest, regardless of attrition (except the last heat of the round) With this method of organization at least 25% of the contestants win something. Much better than the typical 2 or 3 years of never winning that most go through. The goal of advancing to a higher cup would be an incentive to keep working at it to improve from race to race. The radio technology (Spread Spectrum) is on the Horizon (OK, that is a slight pun) to make this easy to do. With the large number of frequencies available to us now, it just takes a bit of coordination until the new technologies are widely available.
Two pole or three pole racing? Hey, three pole is not what it used to be anymore with the elimination of slicing and buttonhooks. Clubs go out of their way to drive into the minds of RC’ers to never fly behind the flight line, then we go stand in the middle of the flight. It is a lot of fun to do that, but difficult for many to get the practice. While I hope that we continue this tradition of the past four decades, we should be able to adapt to build numbers in whatever form people want to begin with at the local level.
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In politics if you want anything said, ask a man. If you want anything done, ask a woman - Margaret Thatcher
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All Forums >> RC Airplanes >> Pylon Universe - RC Pylon Racing >> General Racing Discussion >> RE: My thoughts about re-vitalizing pylon racing 
RE: My thoughts about re-vitalizing pylon racing - 
