Hyperpilot Blog

Sport Cat 1: Fix the Rules First

This is my detailed answer to CIVL’s recent “PG XC Sport Class European Championships” survey.

As the representative of Hungary, one of the countries with the highest average pilot age and with many pilots not willing to fly CCC gliders, I can say that the future of Sport Cat 1 is a very important question for us.

We 100% support Sport Cat 1 comps (both Continental and World), given the proper rules are implemented beforehand. Currently, they are not, and we find it deeply irresponsible to start Sport Cat 1 comps until the rules are correctly prepared for sportive and fair events.

The following areas need to be addressed:

Technical and safety rules

In the current XC competition format, the winner is decided by the final glide section. No matter who leads for 90% of the race, pilots with the fastest gliders will overtake them on the final glide and win. We saw many examples of this at this year’s Krushevo Europeans, where the race leader, first to tag the last turnpoint, was overtaken on the final glide and crossed ESS 20th.

This format of racing has destroyed Open competitions, and there is no reason why it would behave differently in the Sport class once Sport gets elevated to Cat 1 level.

Actually, there are reasons to believe that the Sport class is even more affected than Open, as:

  • Sport gliders currently have no max limiter specifications.
  • Sport gliders have a lower top speed, so they are more prone to being flown at their top speed, unlike CCC gliders. (This comes from their polar curves: flying a CCC glider at its absolute maximum speed is not optimal in typical competition conditions, while flying a Sport glider at its top speed is.)

This is an extremely important issue in our sport, and we need to solve it in the rules before it destroys yet another category.

Two solutions exist which can fix this without any additional hardware (i.e. without adding speed sensors to our kits):

  • Final glide speed limit
  • Linear Elevated Goal/ESS

Explaining these methods is out of scope here; I’ll be describing them in a future blog post.

Point calculation and fair scoring rules

Currently, the Sport WPRS selection system is not ready to be a fair and sportive system for Cat 1 level team selection. The current rules make a single event series, the SRS, the only way of gaining competitive SPRS points.

On the Open side, a lot of care has gone into making a fair system: Nationals need to reserve places for outsiders, and the PWC takes into account National results and League results, as well as internal PWC results. As a result, Open WPRS scoring has a balanced and fair landscape of strong competitions:

  • Nationals
  • PWCs
  • Independent events (like Montegrappa, Alpen Cup, Niviuk Open)

Meanwhile, on the Sport side, currently:

  1. The only way to get competitive points is by getting good SRS results.
  2. The SRS is oversubscribed and doesn’t reserve places for outsiders (i.e. Open pilots trying to get in).
  3. The current WPRS → SPRS calculation gives extremely few points to Sport pilots flying in Open competitions.

On that last point: the WPRS → SPRS calculation currently just takes the same points the pilots received in the Open comp and turns them into SPRS points. This is unfair, as in the Open comp, pilots on Sport wings are beaten by CCC pilots.

For this reason, the same pilots who get on avg. 50 points at SRS comps get on avg. 30 points at Nationals. This also divides the National comps landscape: Sport pilots are attending less and less, since it’s not worth going to Nationals: they get so few points compared to SRS.

This is made even worse by the SRS’s current 1.5x multiplier. An avg. top 25% SRS pilot is:

  • Getting 30 points at Nationals → SRS score 300
  • Getting 50 points at SRS comps → SRS score 750

Thus, entering SRS comps gives a 2.5x difference in entry priority compared to attending Nationals. Of course pilots oversubscribe to the SRS and don’t attend Nationals; it’s all because of the current rules.

My proposal for a fixed WPRS → SPRS calculation would be to take the Sport-only part of the competition and use that as the SPRS score, with a 1.6x multiplier cap. This still does not fully close the gap between Nationals and SRS comps, but it narrows it significantly.

For the other direction: we should require Sport comps to reserve places for outsiders (i.e. not yet Sport pilots), just like Nationals are required to reserve places for outsiders.

These are proposals, of course, and are only tangentially related to the current survey.

Coming back to the survey

Two points:

  • Sport Cat 1 is super important for the future of our sport. It’s crucial that we don’t rush it without having the right rules in place first.
  • The most important question was not part of the survey, namely: “Is your NAC able to finance two, or even three, Cat 1 comps per year (with Juniors)?”

I believe that’s the most crucial question, and everything should follow from there. For example, with an odd/even year format for Sport/Open Cat 1, the rest of the survey would look totally different (of course, Sport teams would receive the same funding, uniforms, etc. as Open teams).

I ask CIVL to consider my points and to think about what would be the right way of launching Sport Cat 1 competitions and what that requires.