JR Challenge 2004 - Page Two
Simon Lockington

The JR Challenge Shield.

Victor Walker, JR Challenge 2004 winner.

The pilots and helicopters of the 2004 event.

The second round was when things really started to heat up, especially in the Sportsman class where some pilots were watching to see what maneuvers the others were doing before establishing what they were going to try!

As the competitors ran through their rounds it really became evident that some were really pushing themselves which impressed me. Only the usual suspects had to be waved off for getting a bit too close. Infact Dean executed the most spectacular maneuver of the day when upon completion of the Split S maneuver in the Sportsman class, he was flying back towards himself when he totally lost it and the helicopter started descending in a knife edge, pirouetting, death spiral combination maneuver. I had already written the helicopter off in my mind when at the last second (literally) he rolled it upright. I tell you, those V-Blades damn near stopped spinning! That earned a stirring round of applause from the crowd!

In the clubman class people still on their training skids were trying their first nose in hovers, circuits and one guy even did his first loops during his round! Those of us in the advanced class were also battling it out trying to pick K-Factor maneuvers hard enough (and therefore high scoring) for us to compete with the clubman and sportsman fliers.

With the first day of competition over, Victor Walker in the Clubman class had won round one, and I had won round two. However more importantly, everyone was having fun and many were buzzing over the new maneuvers they'd tried.

With just enough time to go home and get cleaned up, it was time to head to the local indoor go-kart track. On my trip to Australia, we'd gone go-karting after a days flying and it was highly successful, so I decided to do the same thing for the JR Challenge.
The go-karts were a bit more domestic than the ones we'd used in Australia, but I swear these guys had polished their concrete to ensure plenty (sometimes too much!) sideways action! There was absolutely nothing between these karts powerwise so you had to rely on someone making a mistake to get past.
The track operators also had some kind of radio device where if you played up too much they'd push a button which immediately turned your kart into a dog and everyone would pass you…

Once we'd completed the karting and swapped racing stories (as you do) it was time to meet at the restaurant for more stories from the days events.

SUNDAY
This time the overnight wind hadn't disabled our tent, it was still standing proud when we arrived early Sunday morning and the weather was great again. We'd been exceedingly lucky with the weather this weekend considering the past few months!
We were on a fairly tight timetable as the glider fraternity of our club had been having to postpone their postal competitions for the previous three weeks and Sunday was the deadline for their results, so our competition had to be over by about 1pm.
Round three got off to a good start with the clubman guys going first (their maneuvers are mostly hovering and as the sun was in a bad place for aerobatics, it was decided to run clubman first) and once again Victor Walker put in another sterling round, scoring highly in the compulsory rounds. It was now up to the guys in the Sportsman and Advanced class to see what kind of scores they could pull. Once again though, most guys didn't really care who was winning, rather they were more concerned about where they were in the leaderboard and who was immediately in front and behind them.
Dean had spent Saturday night working on his Raptor with the Webra 91 to get it run better than the dog it so painfully was during the Saturday rounds. He'd fitted a Hatori 700 pipe to it and was having slightly better results, all eyes were on him to see if there'd be a repeat performance of the knife edge, pirouetting death spiral, but alas he finished his round with no dramas.
Another man to watch, Martyn Cook, put in another good flight with his Vigor CS with Webra 91. His Webra had the remote needle mixture carb and his engine was very impressive. I've flown this machine a number of times and was very impressed with the power. Like Dean, I'd had a Webra 91 with the standard carb on it and felt it to be a huge dog and got rid of it to go back to OS engines.
Martyn also had the newest helicopter on the block, a new 3DNT which impressed us all with it's nimble maneuverability at very slow headspeeds. I flew it around at 1100RPM and it performed nice, accurate tic-tocs and rolls. What was a bit more of a challenge though was orienting the thing. It became quite difficult to see what it was up to once it got a fair distance away.
While round three was under way, the practise areas were fully utilized with people practicing, setting up their helicopters, and getting help with setups or problems.
I was the last flier in the last round, then it was on to general funflying while we totaled up the scores. With Victor Walker winning the third round it was obvious he was the winner for 2004, I came second and very closely separated were Aaron Williams (third) and Wayne Ratcliffe (fourth), when I say close I mean just a couple of points out of 2000!
We held a prize giving to allocate the prizes kindly donated by Galtech Models and the New Zealand distributor for Coolpower oil. The prizes were given out to guys who had really pushed themselves in the spirit of the event and as a result Darren Boote took home a bottle of Coolpower as he had really got into things and tried maneuvers he'd not attempted before.
Ofcourse Dean got a prize for his 'from-the-clutches-of-death' save on Saturday, and Ernie Theedom also got a prize for successfully completing his first horizontal M maneuver.
Victor Walker won the JR Challenge trophy for 2004 and of the OS 50, or OS 91 C-Spec, he chose the 50 for one of his Raptors.

Certainly everyone that I spoke to agreed that it was a very successful and enjoyable event and I'd like to think we achieved the goal of encouraging people to branch out and try new things!

THANK YOU:
This event wouldn't have been possible without the support from a number of organisations:

• Galtech Models in Palmerston North donated the shield and other prizes for all the pilots.
• Wellington Model Aircraft Club - in particular Alan Issacs, Alan Forbes and Ross Heald.
• National Rifle Association/Wellington Rifle Association.
• Totara Lodge Licencing Trust.

Everyone who attended had a great time and hopefully the event will run again next year. I may even get enthusiastic about organising an Australian version!