Contest Performance Improvement Process
Part II: Evaluate the causes for falling short of the target group’s score.
This is the second part of this series. Readers who have not done so already may want to go back and read Part I before continuing with this article.
The first part in this series covered the first three 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
By necessity, as you will see in a moment, this part of this series will be dedicated to just one step:
Step 4: Analyze How Much Your Scores Need to Improve and Evaluate the Causes of Your Score Delta
The purpose of this step is to evaluate your contest performance to evaluate how far your scores are from your goals and theorize possible causes for your shortfalls. You can do this after each contest or after a season. You can do this by yourself or you can work on this analysis with a flying partner or coach. I mentally perform this analysis on the drive home from each contest I attend and then perform more in-depth analysis at the end of each season. Next I will provide some examples.
In the previous article in this series I analyzed the 2021 Southwest Classic F5J contest that I attended in February 2021 (see Resources, below, for my detailed report on that event). Breaking into the top 25% would have required averaging 906 points per round. The raw score averages were 9:18 out of a mazimum possible 9:59, 49 landing points out of a maximum of 50, and averaging 130m start height. Next lets see how my scores in the 2021 SWC 2021 F5J fared:
First, I should mention that in Round 7 I had a failure of my F5J switch. The failure was because I messed up the arming routine before flight and inadvertently caused the switch to think I had performed an in-flight motor restart which the switch will blink out a zero.
Otherwise my average flight time was within about 60 seconds, or about 10% of my target group, my average landing was within about 15 points, or 30% of my target group, and my average start height was 215m or within about 65% of my target group.
An analysis of the above shortcomings in my contest performance compared to my goal you can see at the 2021 SWC: I fell short in all three areas of scoring. In Round 7 I also made a mistake due to not having enough contest experience with my F5J switch that cost me a zero in a round, which probably didn’t hurt my score that much because it may have been dropped anyway. Assuming my start height was close to my average for the contest the flight time and lack of a landing that round would have resulted in about 450 points which would have been my dropped round either way.
The area that I had the largest gap in was start height. I was on average climbing way higher than other competitors in this contest. At the time given the performance of my plane (more on that later) and the conditions, I felt that launching high was the best way I could ensure I was able to get close to the flight task time which I was within about 10% of overall. Ensuring I don’t launch over 200m, because the altitude penalty increases greatly for starts over 200m, is something that I do need to work on to improve my F5J contest performance.
For the remainder of the 2021 season I was only able to fly one more F5J contest, the LASS F5J Lite event. It is mostly flown by the F5J rules except it allows pilots to used fixed cutoff ALES (ie. altitude limited electric soaring) style switches. After the SWC F5J I upgraded to a second hand Optimus EL. It is a 55oz, 3.85m all carbon modern F5J plane. Although it isn’t the absolute newest design it is quite a bit more modern than the 59 ounce 3m Graphite I flew at the SWC F5J.
Interestingly, at this contest I achieved my goal of placing in the top 25% but my average flight time and landing was slightly worse than at the SWC event. My average start height was much closer to the average of the first pilot in the top 25% at that event. This could be due to the LASS F5J Lite event having less highly competitive pilots or it could be due to the conditions at this event being more unpredictable. Conditions can be brutal at Muncie.
As an additional data point, I attended three ALES or mixed launch events. Some pilots flew off winches while some pilots used electric models with ALES switches set to 150m contests in the midwest with the Optimus. My scores are below. Note I converted the landing score to the F5J landing scoring system for comparison purposes:
In the two contests I placed in the top 25% — and especially the one I came closest to my goal of winning a contest with at least 20 pilots — my flight times and landings were pretty close to where I would have needed to be to finish in the top 25% at the 2021 SWC F5J. Overall in these three contests I had a much better landing average and about the same average flight time.
My concluding analysis is that where I was falling short in flight time and landing scores I did improve in both areas in the second half of the 2021 contest season. I partially attribute this to more practice with full house electric sailplanes in electric contests. In both of the first two contests I flew this year I made mistakes with my equipment that cost me heavily in scoring. I also partially attribute my improvement to upgrading to a more modern sailplane.
I encourage the reader to do this kind of analysis on your contests and evaluate how much you need to improve to meet your contest goals. It is also possible to theorize possible reasons for the shortcoming in your scores. Even if you can’t address the reasons you have identified as the causes of your shortcomings you could potentially work on options to improve in other areas to try to make headway towards your contest goals.
One typical example of this is if you are flying F3K and your physical abilities limit your launch height and you theorize that is a source of your contest performance shortcomings. In that instance you could heavily focus on air reading, improving your quick decision making, and improving your turn arounds to try to make headway on the score sheet.
Another common example is you may theorize your current plane is the source of your contest performance shortcomings. That certainly may be the case. If you are not in a position to upgrade your plane don’t fret. I was in that situation for years. Try to find ways to continue to improve on the skills that you can improve upon so that when you are able to upgrade that you are positioned to really take advantage of it. I’ll be covering that more in the next several instalments of this series.
Thank you for reading. If you have any questions, please leave them in the Responses section below and I’ll do my best to answer them. This will allow others with similar questions to benefit from the additional information provided.
©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.
All images and tables 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.
