Day 2 PTARWOW! What a day!!! First up I want to thank everyone for their kind words of encouragement. Judging by the comments there are a lot of you that fit right in with our sense of adventure and want for fun. I guess that is what make ALL of us part of the Sling family! Apologies for not updating yesterday as promised, all forms of communication were taken from the competitors and locked into safe bags before the race to ensure that nobody naughty used their cell phones as navigation aids. Not that this helped at all as we were to discover after the race when we were shown some of the courses flown in the debrief. Its amazes me how accurate some navigators are…….. Or should I say it amazes me how incredibly bad some navigators are on leg one and two, and then how precise they are on legs three four and five……. Yes you guessed it. There are a bunch of people who unashamedly cheat but carrying a hand help gps in the aerie… Back to the problem of over revving our motors. Well it turns out there was a very simple solution thanks to MGL. James pointed out that if the race organisers were concerned that we were going to cheat and take our machines up to 5800rpm for short bursts they were welcome to download all the engine parameters off our EFIS SD cards after the race giving them access to every single seconds worth of rpm, horsepower, EGT, CHT…. So with this guarantee in place they were happy to set us on our way with our standing handicaps.The race was absolutely amazing. I tell you what, there is not a lot to navigate by up here (look at the photos) in the Northern Province….. There are small bushes, big dunes, one rives and two roads… Never-the-less The Sling Racing Teams were spectacular! So spectacular that at the debrief when they showed race paths on the big screen they used Grant and Rob, and me and Mikes as an example of how it should be done. James and Terry only overflew direct distance by 1.38%!!! That said we are so over handicapped that we still all came in at least 21 minutes slower than our handicap race time. Right now I don’t know if they will succumb and give us a fair handicap or just send us out into the wild again with no hope of survival but my gut feel is that they will change nothing. Finally I must mention two things. Well done to the organisers of the race. It has run like a well oiled machine and despite complaints from a number of teams the organisers have kept their sense of humour and tied their best to accommodate all requests.So out we go again today to show the world our stunning Slings, our sense of adventure and our love of flying. Till tonight, keep thinking of us, send us messages and live the dream!
