Saturday and Sunday, Great weather and good entries. The grass events at Horotiu had 8 entries in F2B but only one in Sportsman aerobatics so Saturdays flying finished about mid afternoon and that gave the Sunday team race fliers a chance to sort out their models for the next days competition. With a big entry in Combat and good entries in most other classes Sunday was always going to be a long day.
Sunday. First event was combat with nine entries. Loads of fun for everybody plus quite a few re-fly ' s stretched the program a bit but in the end it was that flier from Rotorua John Ryan with a Liquidator powered by a Silver Streak that won the day although he did have to borrow a model for the last two flights. Thanks to Kevin Barnes for that.
Slow Goodyear had 8 entries although we had one scratching before we started. Some good racing and it was most enjoyable especially for some of the guys who do not fly very often. There was lots of swapping around of pilots and pitmen but it all worked out in the end and gave us a great final.
Classic A Team race, 5 entries. The heat times were ok but look how close the final was. Owen Rogers flew a model loaned to him by Laurie Chrystall. Owen has a new model almost ready to fly and it has been made to take the Fora motor and the Super Tigre G20.
Classic B only had two entries but that is one more than usual so we were able to run a couple of races. Adrian Hamilton’ s new model had its first race and promptly broke the speed limit of 5 minutes race time. During the second heat Adrian’ s model picked up Johns lines when landing so that was a DQ for Adrian and a non finish for John, but at least we had a race. Both models were powered by Enya 29s.
Saturday night we had the usual BBQ at our place, 25 people and the weather was so mild we sat outside until close on 10 o’ clock.
A big thank you to Ashley for mowing the circles two Fridays in a row. On the day before the Champs we used two of Ashley’ s ride on mowers. By mowing first without the catcher then going over it again with a lower setting and a catcher I think we had a far better circle than we usually have.
Thank you to Karen Barnes and Andrew Robinson for judging aerobatics. Andrew, Brendan, Dave, Kevin for combat. All the guys for timing and lap counting team race.
Thanks to Helen ably helped by Wendy Wright for the BBQ and to those that cleaned up and washed dishes after it was all over We also had a special attendee. Hans Vissor from the Netherlands is our FAI representative at the meetings in Paris. And for those of you who know what an FMV team race motor is, well he is the V on the side of that motor.
Top to bottom: Magnum in the midst of a horizontal figure-eight Don Robinson’ s away in F2B Graeme Duncan ' s Nobler The South Circle during F2B