Contest Performance Improvement Process
Part III: Determine the best investment to make towards your contest improvement goal.
This is the third part of this series. Readers who have not done so already may want to go back and read Part I and Part II before continuing with this article. — Ed.
The first two parts in this series covered the first four steps of a ten step process. These steps were:
- Determine Your Contest Goals
- Evaluate How You Compare to Your Goals
- Evaluate the Scores of the Group You Aspire to Join
- Analyze How Much Your Scores Need to Improve and Evaluate the Causes of Your Score Delta
This article will discuss the next step: to evaluate the relative value of items from the last step and use this to determine the best investment to make towards your improvement goals.
A competitor may have the temptation to try to work to improve in every scored area of competition. However, that might not be the most realistic path of improvement or the best investment from a time, financial, or opportunity cost perspective. For example, take the F5J raw scoring formula:
Flight seconds (max of 599) — (meters of start height between 0m and 200m * .5) — (meters start height over 200m * 3) + landing bonus (max of 50)
In the F5J example, if you are frequently launching to 220m that would be a launch deduction of 160 points compared to a start height of the slightly lower 200m which would be 100 points. That start height difference would result in more than completely nullifying a perfect landing and would nullify a full minute of flight time. This means for F5J launching above 200m, although sometimes in some extreme conditions may be warranted, in general is very detrimental to contest score. As an example of this we can review my 2021 Southwest Classic F5J contest raw scores:
As you can see from the above example the relative value of me working to improve my landing scores is fairly low at this point. Obviously any improvement is going to be good but even if I could have managed to score perfect landings in every round I would have only improved my raw average by about four percent. In comparison, if I could find a way to lower my launch height’s that were above 200m to 199m yet keep the flight time the same I would have improved my raw average by about 14%.
I flew another F5J contest August 13, 2022:
A few things have changed between the 2021 Southwest Classic F5J and this contest but the biggest change was I upgraded from flying a 3m version of the Millennium design to a relatively current F5J design. One thing that hasn’t changed is that I still manage to fumble switches as I did in Round 5 where I accidentally cut the motor at 34m when I planned to launch about 100m higher. Another thing that has been consistent is I’m still launching a little higher than I probably should. Taking out that one flight where I fumbled the motor switch my average launch height was about 152m. This is close to 20m higher than the average winning score for the flight group I was in. That works out to about 10 points difference of raw score which works out to about 15 points or so of normalized score. That doesn’t seem like a lot but at the top of competitive contests that difference can be what separates first place and 2nd place. I stated in the first article of this series one of my goals for contesting is to win a contest with at least 20 pilots.
For another data point, I will compare my raw scores from the August 2022 Dayton contest with the 2021 Southwest Classic F5J’s top 25%. That contest was a larger two day contest but the weather conditions were somewhat similar. It was a bit flat in the morning, but later in the day the thermals started to develop. The big difference here was the 2nd day of the 2021 contest got really gnarly from a wind perspective but otherwise the air conditions were somewhat similar. The 8th place (lowest placing in the top 25%) from the 2021 contest:
The average flight time here was 9:18, average landing 49, and average launch height 136m. The landing score there is just two points above my landing score but taking out that round where I fumbled the launch switch this average start height is about 15m lower than the average tow which I was launching at the August 2022 contest.
Given my current abilities it may be tempting to me to work on continuing to improve my landings. For F5J It would certainly be satisfying to average a little closer to the 9:59 and fly contests where all of my landings are 50 points. But given where my current landing skills are spending a lot of time to try to improve my average landing score further is probably not as valuable as spending that time working on launching a bit lower and still making the flight time. I had been launching to a relatively conservative 150m. I’m working on a practice regimen where I work to try to lower that launch average first to about 130m then to about 100m or so. I’m working on trying to do a better job of evaluating thermals during the 30s motor run time and practicing to make sure that I get better at not fumbling switches.
Until next time, good luck with achieving your own contest improvement goals!
©2022 Ryan Woebkenberg
Resources
- My Southwest Classic F5J 2021 Experience — My report here in RCSD from this great contest held annually near Phoenix, Arizona.
- 2021 Southwest Classic F5J — The Academy of Model Aeronautics event listing for last year’s event. A great place to learn more about the event.
- Have to Travel and Brought a Sailplane? — It’s nothing to do with contests, but you may also find this article by the same author.
All images and data by the author. Read the next article in this issue, return to the previous article in this issue or go to the table of contents. A PDF version of this article, or the entire issue, is available upon request.
