Pylon Racing
Bidford is a diverse club with glider, caravan and power pilots as members.
John Scott is a power member, who supports our glider members in many ways. John took up Pylon Racing, which is a challenge sport, requiring intense and accurate flying skills. In his own words, this is how it went…
Last year I started Pylon racing, just to make a change from beating up clouds, nothing to do with legalised low flying you understand. We are permitted to go down to 600’ AGL. The problem though is to bust that is to retire gracefully, you are disqualified! We are told what the heights of the turn points are, we are told the maximum height of the ground under the course, we have no idea of the height 200yds to the left of any particular leg, and if your nav is not spot on, you could be over a particular high spot. Yep, you got it, disqualified.
The course is typically 15-20 miles long consisting of 4 turn points, and we’ll go around it 4-5 times. Navigation and accurate flying is essential. If the course is 20 miles and your flying is accurate you will fly 20 miles. If your turning is poor, and you zig zag down the legs you may fly 25 miles, a total of 20 extra miles for a 4 lap race.
Turn points could be a country lane junction, or a tree in a field, actually not that easy to see even when identified by an orange square 2’x2’, so not big. The race is handicapped, the idea being that the slowest aeroplane starts 1st, the fastest starts last. There may be 30 minutes between the start time of slowest and fastest. If the handicapper has got it right and everyone flies super accurately then we should all cross the line at the same time. So here is the first problem, how do you work out the handicap. Basically, you fly a 4 leg course, 1 minute each leg, at race speed, with a high grade GPS. Play with your lap top, know what you are doing, and there you are, one handicap.
So how did I do? Not very well short answer, but all to play for. In my 1st 2 races I was disqualified. Ha! 1st reason was that I was actually 1st over the line. Clearly the handicapper didn’t know what he was doing, I was so off piste and our handicap so wrong that we had to be disqualified. 2nd race I missed a turn point by 50 yards, oops, disqualified!
The final 2 races were at Wellesbourne in September. My aim……..
Not to be disqualified. I wasn’t disqualified but it was my handicap that got me. This time the handicapper had my speed about 7kts faster than I could go, so I was set for take off some minutes later than I should have. Consequently, the other aeroplanes arrived some minutes before me at the finish. They do say that it takes a good 9-10 races before the handicap is about right. So next year it is then. On the plus side, with handicaps taken into consideration, there was 59 seconds between the first and last flight, so I wasn’t that slow
John Scott refuelling his beloved DOTY at our airfield