This has been an interesting and pretty civil discussion involving primarily two polar opposites, personal freedoms and restrictive structures. Thanks to everyone who has posted here without flares that normally result when dealing with such a flammable topic lol.

One aspect I would like to introduce to the discussion is one of the elemental nature of racing or record setting. Racing/record setting are by nature games of managing risk for maximum achievement. The very fact that there are those who want to attempt to "manage" the risk of others flies in the face of the very nature of the sport. Are some "guidlines/disincentives" needed? Yes, but I feel we are trending into the realm of trying to micromanage the sport.

Second, historically, races are not only won by those flying the perfect flight, with decisions made that minimized risk and maximized speed, but ALSO days are won by those same pilots who chose or had to take a major calculated risk to win the day. Those who are trying to eliminate that side of the contest also eliminate a whole grouping of pilots who have developed the skill set for that method of fast flying. This new rule schema/trend that is developing, in essence, penalizes guys like moffat, reichman scott and streideck who knew how to fly very aggressively. Karl has commented on this thread saying basically the same thing. Do all of you "new generation" fliers who want a more regulated form of racing think his opinion is unqualified or out of touch with what sailplane racing is all about? I think many of you actually do and think that form of flying has no place in todays game.

I think much of this argument has been caused by the charactoristics of modern sailplanes themselves. Low saves, landing out, higher risk decisions were normative for racing in the older generation of competition. If you couldn't fly that way, at times, then you could not be competative. Today, performance is such that the game is more a game of micro decisions, not macro ones. When guys today are forced into macro decisions like a low save or even a land out for that matter, they are ill equiped to handle them. That's the true problem underlying a majority of the racing accidents today. Expanded rules implimentation does'nt really address the that fundamental problem but it definitely does redefine the nature of the race.