BMFA League 5 Eastbourne
24th / 25th July 2010
60inch Report by Clayton Landells
F3F report by Mike Shellim
Updated 30th July 2010
BMFA League 5 60inch
Report By Clayton Landells
I was a bit concerned about the length of the drive for the Eastbourne event and was wondering if it would be worth it or not…. It was!!!
We had 11 competitors arrive at the Longman carpark on a nice and warm morning with a gentle breeze which built throughout the day to a pretty decent wind. I should wear my glasses more often as the puddle that I was directing Steve to aim the course at was actually some exposed chalk, not water! After embarrassing myself and briefing the pilots after John Phillips welcomed us to Eastbourne, we were off and running.
John showed us all how it was supposed to be done and won the first five out of six heats. The course was set with base B quite a bit higher than A. This required a bit of thought about the best line for the races. Frank was Mr. Consistent and was second after the six heats followed by five of us hanging on to third place. Jason Bioletti flew very consistently with his Wildthing60 to take the next place in front of Tim Prevett who had an interesting day with too many ground meets plane instances, sharing the position with Allen Elliott. Allen and Jason (Jiberjaber) were our two fresh-faced newbies for the day with Jason rounding out the field for the heats. The day flew by with many very close races and a couple of mid-airs. The only real damage from the day was Mike Evans losing the nose on his very pretty Reaper in an awkward landing. Allen discovered how hard a plank is to control with a double-centring servo and did quite well considering how hard he had to fight the plane.
After much head-scratching and discussion, the knockout half of the day was organised. The first round was run and with the top two from each race progressing Allen and Jason were the first to be eliminated after head to head races with Tim and Jason B who progressed to the next stage of the knockouts. That left us with 9 pilots so we had three races of three pilots. The next round saw Mark, Jason B and Tim drop out with John racing Mike, Frank racing Dave and myself racing Steve for the three positions in the 20 lap final. If I was a gambling man I would have put money on John, Frank and Steve to go through to the final, but I would have lost all my money as the three pilots in the final race were Mike, myself and Dave! As usual the final race was 20 laps. Dave and Mike got great starts and were very close until Mike cut and dropped back from Dave into my clutches after my not so good start. Mike 'n' I had a great race in very close proximity until the inevitable happened and we had a mid-air. I was able to continue and unfortunately mike wasn't. I put my head down and tried my hardest to catch Dave and pushed too hard cutting base B and then cutting the recovery loop too, scuppering any chance of catching Dave. Massive thanks to all those that came along, especially the locals. Thanks also to John Phillips and the ESSA for hosting the event
60inch Results ( NYMRSC Members in BOLD)
Pos Name Pts 1 Dave Rumble 98 2 Clayton Landells 97 3 Mike Evans 96 4 John Philips 95 5 Frank Hulton 94 6 Steve Clarke 93 7 Mark Abbotts 90 8 Jason Bioletti 85 9 Tim Prevett 84 10 Allen Elliot 82 11 Jon Styles 80
BMFA League 5F3F
Report by Mike Shellim
The Long Man is a private site located in a beautiful part of Sussex. It also happens to be the easiest venue for me to get to, as it's barely a couple of hours drive from North London. However many Northern flyers don't find it quite so accessible. Any hint of a poor forecast tends to reduce the attendance, so just nineteen pilots turned up on Sunday.
The SW bowl presents quite a challenge - it's not very deep, the edge isn't level, and it often gets a lot of turbulence. Fortunately the lift was relatively smooth this time, nevertheless there were still a few prangs: John Bennett damaged his Skorpion due to radio link problems, and Simon Thornton suffered a damaged wing when a wooden post rose up and hit his wing on landing. Times varied between the low forties and the upper fifties.
After a lot of rounds (I lost count, but it was around ten!) we had a winner in John Phillips. Simon Thornton was runner-up, with third place going to Mike Evans.
A special mention is in order for Jon Styles who flew his large scale Salto. It didn't win any prizes for speed, but it looked gorgeous in the air, and drew lots of applause.
All in all a great day's racing, and lots of fun! My thanks to CD Julian Perrott and all the ESSA crew for all their hard work.
F3F Results ( NYMRSC Members in BOLD)
Pos Name Pts 1 John Philips 8339.1 2 Simon Thornton 8297.7 3 Mike Evans 8142.7 4 Joel West 8062.6 5 Mark Abbotts 7948.1 6 Martin Newman 7850.5 7 Mick Walsh 7821.6 8 A Richardson 7765.0 9 Mike Shellim 7740.3 10 John Bennett 7637.9 11 Gary Harrison 7522.2 12 Frank Hulton 7502.3 13 Dave Rumble 7387.7 14 Tony Robertson 7325.2 15 Tom Noble 7298.3 16 Jason Bioletti 7070.9 17 Clayton Landells 7045.6 18 Jon Styles 2090.2 19 Julian Perrott 810.4