ORIGINAL: Ed Smith
These planes require hundreds of hours of construction and many hundreds of dollars in each one.
Hundreds of construction hours???? What on earth are you building?
Ed S
One race plane, one spare, one crash, one more plane, another crash, another plane; every piece of every plane sanded by hand to remove 0.050 inch of material to save 0.005 ounce of weight off each piece. No, it is not unusual to spend a couple hundred hours scratch building planes for a season of pylon racing. There are several old timers around here that claim to do just that. Most of them don't even fly their planes, either, they find some young hotshot pilot yet to surrender his visual acuity and reflexes to the onset of aging to fly the planes.
The point is, why should I bother racing if I don't have a snowball's chance of doing well once in a while. It simply isn't a race if one plane is consistently significantly faster than others. Playing follow the leader around the pylons is boring. Put the master builders with hired pilots in a class by themselves, let the rest of us have some fun. That's exactly what AMA does at the Scale Masters.