Practice Day 2 Report
Practice Day 2 Report – Welcome to the Wild West!
Good evening race fans,
Today was the 2nd practice day at the 2022 Club Class Nationals. CD Bif Huss used today as a dress rehearsal for the real thing. We gridded at 11:30am and launched our sniffer, Steve Hill, around noon. Rapidly developing OD to the northeast forced Bif to reverse the direction of our Assigned Area Task on the grid. Local conditions at launch were nothing to write home about, so we held the launch until closer to 12:45pm to wait for conditions to really start cooking.
I launched in the back half of the grid and quickly climbed to almost 14k ft. Again, due to rapidly developing OD, the CD and task committee decided to shorten the task time from 2.5 hours to 2 hours. Keep in mind that this was just a practice day. Expect longer tasks starting on our first real race day tomorrow!
The start gate opened at 1:52pm local time, and I got going about 20 min after that. This contest is being run under FAI rules with a start line and mandatory “tag-up” altitude, in this case 12k ft MSL. For those not familiar, that means that pilots are required to have at least one fix in their flight trace below the tag-up altitude between the time the start gate opens and the time the pilot starts. I used that 20 min to get into a decent position for the start, ultimately crossing the line around 14k ft with markers (other gliders) out ahead of me.
Conditions on course were challenging. Significant OD meant most pilots, me included, only nicked the first two cylinders. The rest of the flight was mostly straightforward, aside from a significant wrinkle in the Manzano turnpoint: more OD, this time with significant virga. The smart pilots went the long way around the virga; the rest of us went straight for the turnpoint. I can’t speak for any other pilots, but I hoped the virga was a few kilometers inside the turn cylinder. As a famous racing pilot is equally famous for saying, “hope is not a strategy,” and today it certainly held true.
As of this writing, it looks like Gary Ittner won the day in his Discus 2a, again, followed this time by Tony Condon in the world’s fastest Standard Cirrus and Tom Holloran in his LS-8. Gary smoked the field with a raw speed of just over 146 kph and a handicapped speed of 132 kph.
Tomorrow’s our first real race day. We’ll see how it goes. Until then, see you at the airport,
Michael Marshall