Control Line: Racing
WRITE A COLUMN for a magazine? Who, me? Sure, you never know what's going to happen if you don't try. But I've never done anything like that before! Who cares? You've got some ideas and you don't seem to be afraid of mouthing about them, no matter who's listening. That was just about the gist of a conversation I had recently with Carl Wheeley of AMA. It seems we've a new publication here and some special interest columns are in order. Carl and I had a long conversation at last year's Nats awards banquet and he remembered!
Control Line: Racing
MY LAST TWO columns have been devoted to an article that appeared in the Gazette, the publication of the FAI Control Line Society. We'll finish it this time and then present similar information that applies to Rat and Goodyear. O.K., here's Marlon Gofast: Section II: Flying With Others "So far, all of the things affecting speed that the pilot can contribute to have been discussed, but mainly as if the pilot were out there flying all by himself. In competition, the presence of others in the circle won't change these facts, but it will change what the pilot has the opportunity to accomplish. The discussion of these problems is necessarily much more qualitative. It is impossible to estimate the speed loss due to getting your lines caught in the competition's hair, for instance.
Nats CL: Racing
THE BIG STORY in the Racing events this year was the low level of entrants but very high level of performance. It was a lot of fun to come to California for a Nats, but it is a long way out here from the East. I suppose the miles are longer from East to West than from West to East. Well, I guess the Nats will be back East somewhere the next time so the contestant level should be high again. But I doubt the level of performance will be much better than it was here in Riverside this year. Team Race: The FAI Team Race event was held this year in conjunction with the World Champs team selection for 1978. The final two rounds for the team selections were used as the preliminary rounds for the Nats TR event.
Control Line: Racing
LOOKING BACK at the recent Riverside Nats, I find that I'm proud to be from District 8! If you read my report on control line racing at the Nats a couple of months ago, you have a general idea of what went on, but now I'm going to crow a bit about what the people from this area did this year. Let's start with Goodyear. There was a very small turnout this year. Only 19 entrants made it to the qualifying circle. Of this small turnout, Vic Garner and Ed Jacobs, event directors, decided to take 12 to the finals, rather than run semi-finals and finals. (This, by the way, met with near unanimous approval by the fliers.) Out of those 12, seven were from District 8, and six of the seven were from what I call the "axis"-Oklahoma City, to Dallas/Ft. Worth, to Houston.
Control Line: Racing
NEW RACING RULES: The final results from the Control Line Contest Board were published just recently (as I write this), and there are a few quite significant changes that we all should be aware in preparing for the 1978 season. I'll comment on a few of the more important changes. First off, the entire section on Control Line Racing in the rules book has been rewritten. We now have a general set of racing rules, called the Unified Control Line Racing Rules, that govern all of the AMA Racing events. If you will go back a few years you will find that, at one time, all the events referred to the Rat Race rules for the general rules. Obviously, this was because Rat was the first of the racing events, following the demise of AMA Class B Team Racing a number of years ago, and all the events since then merely added some new dimension to create the new event.
