Contest Performance Improvement Process
Part I: Ten steps for moving steadily up the leader board.
Throughout my quarter century journey competing in RC soaring contests, I have continuously worked to improve my contest flying performance. This probably wasn’t always obvious to most people that flew contests with me because for many years I finished at the bottom of the score sheet. Over the past decade or so I have tried to get more analytical and systematic in evaluating my contest flying. I have decided to write a series of articles as a way to put the methods I have used to improve my placing into a more formal multi-stepped system. Although I have done all of these exercises several times, this is the first time I have made an effort to put all of the items into a more formal process which I will demonstrate over the next several articles.
Step 1: Determine Your Contest Goals
The first step is to honestly state what your goals are from a contest performance perspective. You don’t have to publicize these goals. However, I have heard it said that publicizing your goals has a certain effect of making you live up to what you have announced to the world. Whatever your goals are, those goals you set are perfectly appropriate for you. I’m not here to crush anyone’s dreams. That said, one thing I have heard a really good contest pilot say — and I am paraphrasing here — is “you work hard to improve your flying and then when you improve your flying your scores improve and when your scores improve you start to win contests”. To that end, I have recently set my goals as more of a ‘placing range’. Since you the reader are taking the time to read this article I will put it out into cyberspace that my contest performance goal is twofold: to place in the top 25% of half of the contests I attend and to someday win a contest with at least 20 pilots.
Step 2: How Do You Compare to These Goals?
Once you have taken some time to think through your goals and state them, this step is fairly straightforward. I record all of my flights and all of my contests in a spreadsheet so I can evaluate how far I am from my goals. I suggest pilots that want to make a structured effort at improving their scores do similarly.
The following is presented as an exercise in demonstrating the evaluation of how far a pilot is from their goals. The second part of my goal is easiest to evaluate. I have never won a contest with at least 20 pilots. I have been close a few times finishing 2nd in a contest with 32 pilots in 2003, finishing first in a contest with 18 pilots also in 2003, 2nd in a contest with 23 pilots in 2014, and 2nd in a contest with 19 pilots in 2021. For evaluating the first part of my goal I do a season ending analysis on my contest results. My 2021 contest placings are as follows:
In 2021 I placed in the top 25% in exactly half of the contests I attended.
Step 3: Evaluate The Contest Scores of Your Target Group
For this step you can evaluate the scores of the contests you attended or evaluate scores of contests you would like to attend — your Target Contest(s). My suggestion would be to evaluate at least the scores of contests you have attended because you will need to do that in Step 4 anyway (covered in the next article in this series).
For demonstration purposes I will evaluate the scores of the top 25% of the Southwest Classic (see Resources, below). A few things should be understood about this contest, however, before proceeding with this evaluation. This is an F5J contest and as such each pilot is entitled to drop their worst score. In the spreadsheet below that dropped score is identified by an asterisk in front of the score. Also F5J is flown in flight groups and normalized. The pilot with the best raw score of the flight group gets 1,000 points and all other pilots in the flight group are scored as pilots score divided by the winners score multiplied by 1000. Finally F5J’s raw scores are a maximum of 599 seconds of flight score. F5J is flown in a 10 minute window where the maximum possible duration score is 9:59 due to the time stopping at the end of the window and the time not being able to be started until the beginning of the window. The maximum possible landing points is 50. Landing points are scored in five point increments with 50 points being the best possible, 45 points the second best and so on. There is also a start altitude penalty of half a point per meter up to 200 meters and three points per meter for every meter over 200 meters. These penalty points are subtracted from the duration and landing bonus score.
Breaking into the top 25% of at that contest would have required scoring an average of 906 points each round that counted. Remember, since the contest is F5J that means that one round could be really bad and been dropped. Looking at the raw scores of the 8th place pilot (the threshold of my top 25% goal) a few things can be observed: the average flight time of the nine rounds that counted (Round 6 is a drop score) was 9:18. This meant this pilot dropped 369 seconds over the nine rounds from a maximum theoretical best possible flight time. This pilot’s landings over the nine rounds that counted were excellent: scoring 50s in all rounds but two where the pilot scored 45s. This pilot’s average launch height was 136 meters.
At this contest a pilot could have broken into the top 25% by consistently getting within 30 seconds of the target flight time, consistently landing within two meters of the landing spot (landing within two meters is a 45 point landing in F5J), and launching to a relatively conservative ~130 meters on average. The drop round allows you to have one really bad round but otherwise I would have needed to average within 40 seconds of the flight target from a reasonable start height and score a solid landing to make it into the top 25% of that contest, which as we will see in the subsequent article’s analysis I didn’t manage to do.
This exercise can be repeated for each contest you attend or you can also do this analysis on contests you have not yet been able to attend. If your goal is to place in the top five at a contest with 50+ pilots, for example, and you have not yet been able to travel to contests that large you can use the contest results at GliderScore (see Resources, below) to evaluate the type of scores that would be required to break into that group.
That covers the first three steps of my process. Over the next few issues I will continue this journey of contest performance self improvement. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to leave them in the Responses section below and I will do my best to answer them.
©2021 Ryan Woebkenberg
Resources
- GliderScore “Automates the running of your competition: DigitalTimer automates calling pilots to fly and timing of flight groups; eScoring…automates score collection and updating; produces draw reports, scoring sheets and score cards…” and a number of other useful features.
- My Southwest Classic F5J 2021 Experience The author’s account of the F5J contest mentioned in the article abovce.
All images and data tables are 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.
