Arriving at the pylon flying site the weather was absolutely perfect . Light wind from the south and sunny skies . Unloading my gear and finding out that I had left my two sets of wings for my Sportsman and Intermediate racers back at home . They were still sitting on the shelf in the garage , not a good start . Luckily my daughter was with me to do the pylon calling duties so she did a quick dash back to Christchurch with another helper to collect the wings . While they were away I put my other racers together , lucky I remembered those wings .
While putting my models together I noticed the wind coming up and it was getting stronger . Hmmm . Fellow competitors were arriving and starting to put their planes together , while others were putting up the pylon poles and setting out the course . We had been very fortunate to have had a practice day the day before so setting up was a bit quicker .
We had a pilots briefing at 9.00am . I was getting a bit worried about my daughter as she was not back with the wings that I had forgotten . Anyway , by the time we put up the tent for the timers to shelter in , she had turned up . I quickly put the wings on my racers and I was ready to go . At this stage the wind was getting up and we had Sportsman class up first with myself , Les King and Grahame Hart .
Racing got underway . There were a few of issues with the turn lights not working correctly . Whether it was the electric fence causing the problem or something else was unclear . Perhaps the guys working the lights were not pressing the buttons hard enough ? Sometimes the whole three lights were going on at once for me in some of the racing , when no other racer was around . Anyway the problem seemed to go away most of the time so racing continued .
Sadly Grahame Hart crashed his model . I didn ’ t see it go in but got told of this after the race had completed . I think Grahame might of got a wee bit confused on which way his racer was going , and the fact that it was getting quite windy . Grahame was flying really well too , as I could see out of the corner of my eye . He was flying his racer so good on practice day , a real shame sorry for your mishap . That left myself and Les to race together for the last couple of heats . The wind was getting stronger making it very hard to fly without going wide . Landings were interesting , but we finally finished this class without further mishap .
It was onto the next class of racing which was Q500 sport . We had six entries for this and we split into two groups . First up was Matt Mackenzie , Les King & Richard Tier . This was Richard ’ s first time racing in a National event . He did really well under the circumstances with the wind , like most of us going way past No 1 pole . Anyway he was keeping up with everybody else even though their racers were faster . There was not much in the times between all of us .
Matt Mackenzie with Cup and Q500
By this time the wind was getting quite blowy , the competitors continued their racing but were still complaining about the lights . Sometimes not getting the light or having more than one light on the same racer . I was watching from the pit area until It was my turn to race , I could see the guys flying at least 20 to 40 metres passed the No 1 pole before they even got a light ( not good ). Under the conditions they all flew pretty well and were all fairly close together in the racing .