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.