On May 31, 2:38*pm, wrote:
Gentleman:

Perhaps my first post was mildly misunderstood. While it is great that
Club Class ships can perform like the big boys in the right hands, my
main point was not that our ships are capable of feats like the newer
ships, but rather was that we completed, at a fast speed, a called
ASSIGNED TASK (!!!) of 498km in Club Class Worlds. Getting to fly AT's
in club class ships is part of the fun of this class. In sports, it is
all theoretical racing, very rarely real racing. That takes much of
the fun out of it for me anyways.

If I had not been working weekends all spring (rowing coach), I would
definitely hauled my ass and my glider out to Cordele to have gotten
in on this 1st.

ASIDE: Rules Committee, why do we have increasing numbers of big,
popular contests in the spring when young people with real jobs and
families are stuck with school schedules or ther conflicts and have to
miss this stuff???

Getting to race against one's own and the ability to get to fly
assigned tasks against like competition (glider wise) is VERY
EXCITING. Any of the doubters should try it before they get all
defensive that the Club Class is going to eat another classes lunch.
Myabe the other classes lunch needs to be eaten inorder to breathe
more life into the other classes???

As far as Markus' stats at the last two WGC's go, some of those speed
tasks in Vinon were more or less Racing tasks - thereby skewing the
task calling way in the direction of assigned tasks in club class in
Europe

To 9B and BB and other doubters, why is there this constant drumbeat
in your posts about the evils of "specialisation" in the club class
and against the "club class specialist"???

What makes this any different from the pilot who owns a ASW-27 0 if
you are serious you are going to compete in 15m, or the pilot in a new
shiny ASG-29 - if you are serious you are going to compete in 18m.
Yeah, your ships are good enough to also swing into some other fai
classes should you wish. If youa re truly serious about flying and
winning open class, shouldn't you do it in an ASW-22 or Nimbus 4?

BUT for all of us in 1st/2nd generation glass ships, the only truly
fair and nearly head-to-head racing to be had is in a CLUB CLASS as it
is run trhoughout the rest of the world.

Flame shield on to high - but super-kudos to Sam Glitner et al for
succeeding and commiting to the Club Class idea in reality, when I
have only been able to beat the drum for it in writing. Great job
guys.

EY

No need for flames Tim.

I guess I figure the real point of competition is to test the skills
of each pilot against as big a pool as is fair and practical. I find
the "specialization" arguments to be useful only up to a point. For
instance - the ultimate in specialization is to divide competitive
classes into single glider models - so you'd have a Ventus 2 class, an
ASW-27 class, an ASG-29/15 class, etc. All of these gliders have
slightly difference performance, so you can make an argument that each
deserves it's own class. Of course most of us would call this
absurd. But we already have the World Class. The result appears to be
to specialize down to the point that you can't hardly pull a nationals
together.

We don't have the Club Class numbers in the US that the Europeans
have, so the cost of specialization is reduced levels of competition
because of fewer numbers of pilots per class. If you take all the
Sports Class regional contests over the past 5 years and divide the
gliders into Sports and Club Classes you see that the number of
competitors per class would have been so small that something like
60-70 percent of the competitors would have ended up on the podium -
that's hardly robust competition.

The reason I argue for careful monitoring of the Club Class
experiments is to determine whether they are really growing the sport
or shrinking it by pushing Sports Class pilots (flying non-club class
gliders) out of competition. Watching UH finish #2 on a MAT at Mifflin
certainly is at least one data point that you can have AST-type tasks
AND low handicap gliders in Sports Class - and that they can be
competitive. Furthermore, I think the idea of including two-seaters
and older open class ships to have more potential for growing the
sport than Club Class, but of course Sports Class includes BOTH.

I find the AST fixation to be mostly a red herring. I grew up in the
sport flying nothing but assigned tasks. Never having to make
decisions about where conditions will be the strongest, increased
gaggle flying, leeching and the vagaries of thunderstorms at
turnpoints that land out half the field all argue that ASTs are less a
true test of pilot skill that the other task types. Sure, they are
more fun and easier to figure out who won - which have an emotional
appeal for us all, but let's not confuse that with testing piloting
skill. I'm willing to bet that the variance in speeds across a MAT or
TAT task on average is higher than an AST - separating out the scores
among finishers is the real test of skill, not landing out a bunch of
pilots because the day ended early or the leg home was got washed out.

One potential solution at the regional level is to do what we do in
the FAI classes, run combined Sports/Club class contests the same way
we offer combined Std/15M classes if you don't have enough pilots in
each separately. The point of racing should be to fly against a full
field of pilots, not to limit the number of competitors to improve
your chances of winning. This is particularly true when we are talking
about WGC team selection.

9B