The summer 2018 is one of the hottest we can remember and so is the GPS-Triangle racing season!
At its “summit” on the end of July the competition on the southern border of the Black Forrest in Untermettingen was on the schedule.
Untermettingen is well known as one of the classics, if not “The classic” on the GPS-Triangle Eurotour. The organizing club is supporting the GPS-Triangle community and organizing competitions since almost 10 years now and the thermal activity on the field usually is second to none.
It was on this field when in former days Marco Mani set an unbelievable world record flying 17 triangles with his Horky Arcus, which set the benchmark for years to come and was only beaten a very few times since then!
Taking the drive to Untermettingen therefore still means exposing yourself to a lot of excitement.
With this in mind 20 GPS-triangle enthusiasts took the journey to the Black Forrest this year to compete.
The weather forecast for Saturday though was showing the only rainy day since weeks in the hot central European summer. Luckily it took only until 11:30 for the rain to stop so we could start to fly. Nevertheless after this huge rain front going through there was none of the usual “Untermettingen-lift” to find the whole day. Wind was blowing downhill on the flying site and the overcast skies made it impossible to find usable lift. On this day we still could manage to fly three rounds in the 1:3-class followed by one speed task and 2 rounds of SLS.
With lots of luck Philip Kolb managed to crawl around the triangle-course 2 times doing 5 laps each flight – high score for this gusty day. Some rounds were even won with three laps and a fairly high average speeds of 71kph. There was actually no real other solution than loading the planes up with ballast and trying to get around the course as fast and as precise as possible to tweak out 3 or 4 laps, depending on either there was some “up” or some “down” tendency in the gusty air.
In this conditions almost all of the competitors were loading up their airplanes to the 115gr/sqdm wingloading-limit to push through this rough air. Fortunately with the new landing rules, which allow the competitors to land almost on the entire airfield, there were no incidents at all. Especially in rough conditions this is a huge advantage and makes mass landings a lot safer.
Due to the fact that almost everyone flew equal amounts of triangles the scores were very tight after the first day. In the SLS-class only 7 points separated the top three pilots with Florian Schambeck in the lead, followed by HG Siegenthaler and Philip Kolb.
Andreas Kunz, who flew his Baudis ASW-22B around the course for a four-laps-flight with astonishing precision and altitude to spare – his F3B-experience totally pays off in this conditions – landed out in a corn field which costed him the almost certain 1000points and dropped him in 4th position for the day. Bummer!
In the evening the wind slowly was calming down and the organizers decided to run the speedtask in this constant conditions rather to do it on the next day with a certain chance to have a kind of “thermal-lottery”.
The best speeds were flown by Daniel Aeberli with his Chocofly ASW-17x and an average speed of 158kph and Philip Kolb with the AN-66 flying it around the triangle with an average speed of 161kph.
The next day greeted the competitiors with bright sunshine in the morning and some booming lift to come. Excitement was around the corner and while the first group of the SLS class flew in almost neutral conditions the second group stated into developing lift. Andreas Kunz, still trying to swallow the disappointment of the day before took a late launch to hopefully catch one of the developing low level thermals. And it payed off!
After everyone was on the ground after four or five laps Andreas found lift in about 90m of altitude and kept on thermaling for about 10min just to stay in the air. It was a great flight to witness one plane up and all the others watching with anxiety or excitement. A few birds came out to signal the developing lift and Andreas kept on hopping from one thermal to the other using them like stepping stones to finish this flight with seven triangles in his pocket. This is what GPS-racing is all about – and the “Untermettingen-classic-conditions” were back for good! From this moment on it was racing at its best for the rest of the day. In the next group it was Daniel Aeberli flying 8 triangles after finding the first big thermal of the day with more than 2m/s climbrate and thereby winning his group. Tactics thereby changed. One was out not to find lift but to find the best lift on the field from that moment on! The thermals to hunt from noontime on were the ones with 3m/s climbrate or more leading to flights with 10 or more triangles. One quickly had to adopt from finding the best lift and getting the most altitude out of it to pushing through huge sink within cycles of 3 to 4 minutes. Thereby the real HUGE flights of 15 or more triangles were not possible on that day because the thermals were passing so quickly. Nevertheless, the thermals were strong for the time they were passing over the field allowing a maximum of 13 triangles on this day. Because of the 700m ceiling we saw one group rocketing across the sky for about 8 minutes in these “Untermettingen boomers” trying to keep their planes below the altitude penalty zone by speeding up to 150kph at times not to climb over the 700m-limit!
Actually these kind of rapidly changing lift-to-sink-conditions require the most skills from the pilots to adopt within very short time to the air and base their tactics upon and after all lead to the most memorable experiences in GPS-Triangle soaring!
We all sure will AGAIN remember this classic, the Untermettingen GPS-race and hope to be back for more next year!
Thank you to the Modellairplane club of Untermettingen for this outstanding competition, to the “Power-Towing-Team” from Switzerland who came over to tow us up into the air and to everyone involved. We definitely want to race there again in 2019!
In the end the winners were (SLS class):
- Florian Schambeck (flying a Schambeck Quintus)
- Philip Kolb (flying a fineworx AN-66)
- Daniel Aeberli (flying a Chocofly ASW-17)
and (SCALE class):
- Philip Kolb (flying a fineworx AN-66)
- Josef Mögn (flying a fineworx AN-66)
- Daniel Aeberli (flying a Chocofly ASW-17)
See you all hopefully soon on the GPS-Triangle racecourse!
Philip Kolb