After Hanno Prettner won the '77 World Championship with it, the Curare captured everyone's imagination with its aggressive looks, the funky F-4 Phantom-like anhedral tailplane, and with being the first "super-equipped" championship winner (fuel pump, tuned pipe, flaps and spoilers, even a mixture servo, when retracts were the only "complication" most other designs of the era adopted).

It seems to me that most people tend to forget that Wolfgang Matt not only came second to Prettner in '77 with the Atlas, but that he beat Prettner and a full-house Curare two years earlier, winning the World Championship in 1975 with an Atlas that only had the usual four-way controls plus retracts. It also only had a standard silencer, and dead simple suction feed for the fuel system - no pump, not even exhaust pressure. Matt didn't think he needed any of all that to win, and it turned out he was right!

The Atlas and its successor the Arrow also had the widest wingspan of all the championship winners up to 1981 at least. Matt's designs were forerunners of the later generation of planes with wider wingspans and more constant speeds.

Don't get me wrong, the first pattern ship I ever flew in the 1980's was a Curare and I loved it. I have a very soft spot for it. Ideally I'd like to build one some time. But I'm glad to see the Atlas leading the vote.

I hope to build one (or two) myself soon, and am very happy Don has made glass epoxy fuselages available.

And I have to agree, we haven't seen an Atlas build thread recently...