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Tactics and Techniques - RC Pylon In the fall of 2002 I published an RC Combat article called “Tactics and Techniques”. The intent of this article was to inform combat competitors of the tactics Michele, my Combat teammate and now lovely wife, and I used. Also, I hoped to demonstrate techniques for less reliance on the lucky streamer cut for improved consistency. This article followed Michele and I's first RC Combat National Championship and was exceptionally popular. I still get comments on it today. On a long flight back from a business trip overseas, it occurred to me a Pylon Racing version might also be worthwhile. Scott Causey and I broke through this year and won a Gold Cup race in Fort Lauderdale (FL) and followed that up with a Q-40 and Overall AMA National Championship. What does that mean? Not much, other then hopefully racers will take this info as a little more credible with a couple wins to back up the theories. This article is intended to be a useful guide for newer racers and those trying to put the final hone on their pylon racing skill set. Hopefully, it will be an enjoyable, light hearted, read that will help you have more fun and success racing RC Pylon, my hands down favorite. This article will be broken down into the following sections.
There's no I in TEAM Scott “The Missile” Causey and I have written numerous times about the importance of the Pilot-Caller Team in RC pylon racing. I will start this article with the team because without Scott by my side, I would not have won the 2 big races this year, plain and simple. There's no I in TEAM, but there is a ME. I say this because the TEAM dynamic can have its ups and downs. I've not always been the best teammate, especially after Scott has made a calling mistake. He's a phenomenal caller, far better then I, and rarely makes mistakes. Let's be honest though, racing at the top-level is not easy and mistakes happen. It's how you as a team respond to those mistakes that I believe set the great teams apart. We've not spoken to one another for fairly long periods of time during a contest. However, if you both default to a true position of wanting your teammate to excel, you'll work through those moments of frustration and learn from those low points with the goal of never repeating the blunder. I'll talk about the Game Plan in the next section. Now, I'll focus on our interactions on the flight line. I'm hopeful this will help you and your teammate think about what's important and how to avoid those moments of discontent because I believe it all begins on the flight line. Scott and I get ready to start like any other team. We have a highly choreographed routine; some may even call it anal retentive and I'm okay with that. With a much rehearsed routine, each team member knows there role and this helps avoid those moments of panic. You know the ones when your heart begins to pound because your motor won't fire due to something as simple as fuel shut-off being engaged. Your thoughts get jumbled together and the 60 second clock starts to fly, aka fire drill. RC Pylon Racing, in my opinion, is very much a mental game as are most competitive endeavors. If your mind is not in the right frame, you'll never be successful blazing around the course at close to 200 mph. The flight line routine helps keep each person focused on doing their job. I lay down my flight line gear in exactly the same spot each heat. I place the starter on the ground just ahead of the spinner. I set the tachometer on the ground to the right of the starter pointed at the prop and check to make sure it's on the right setting. The flight line box with radio still setting in its slot sits just outside the tach. The glo-driver goes to the left of the engine well behind the plane of the propeller. The radio is turned on and the correct model is verified. Once on the clock, I first remove the fuel restriction; either the clamp or fuel shut-off, activate the glo-driver and fire the motor up. Set the needle, place the gear back in the flight line box, and Scott begins to keep the motor cool. In Q-40, he chokes the motor with his finger and in Q-500 he holds the nose of the racer down. I move the flight line box to the side of the plane and start my trek back to my flying position. Keep the flight line box relatively close to your caller and plane should something go wrong, aka initiate fire drill, and a quick restart is required. On my way back I remove my earplugs and position the Futaba FASST, shameless product plug, antennae to a vertical position. Once there, Scott looks back and I give him a head nod to acknowledge I'm ready to rock. He does his thing and I do mine from there. Normally I wouldn't get this detailed but I believe this first 60 seconds really sets the tone for the heat. By compulsively following a routine, it becomes instinctual. This means your brain quits applying resources to it and you can begin to focus on the take-off and getting around the poles. I bet if you think back to your best heats, you don't remember a thing about the start up sequence. I believe this is due to not having to think about it or therefore remember it. I'm going to end this section right there. Remember the routine and there's no I in TEAM to help improve the Pilot-Caller dynamic. Aggressively Conservative Game Plan The what? I heard Randy Bridge use this description of his flying style a couple years ago. Not that I worship Randy or anything, as my wife Michele may lead you to believe, but I will reference he and Travis Flynn a lot in this article. The Bridge-Flynn team is arguably, I argue there are, the most successful team in the current era and perhaps ever. They've amassed 6x Overall National Championships, countless big race wins, and a World Championship. So, I've watched these two very closely over the years and Scott and I have used them as our RC Pylon Team template. Now that you're hanging with the big dawgs, sorta speak, how do you seal the deal with a victory. The Aggressively Conservative Game Plan is part of this equation. In the simplest of terms, it means you can't win if you do something stupid like cut or crash. One of things that has made Scott and I successful this year was the reduced bone head count of mistakes and the impact of the remaining mistakes. In other words, by developing a reputation of not making mistakes, this helps put the pressure on your competitors. We've had some breaks this year that I'll talk more about in the next section, but we've also minimized the impact of our mistakes. The impact of the mistake is what makes or break your weekend. For example, let's say you make a mistake on the needle or the first lap of a heat and somebody gets a jump on you. Don't compound that mistake by cutting trying to catch up. Now you've turned that probable 1-2 point mistake into a 4 point mistake. In AMA pylon racing it's all about amassing points. At both the FL race and the NATS Scott and I had our 2/race mistake count, which we're of course trying to improve on. However, these mistakes only cost us 1 point at each contest. Granted there were a couple breaks involved but we didn't allow those mistakes to turn into 2+ pointers each. Another way to think about the Conservatively Aggressive Game Plan is you only need to fly fast enough to win the heat. If go you out there every time to set Fast Time, you're going to amass a pretty long list of mistakes. With the Fast Time Aggressive strategy you steal the margin for error primarily at pylon one. If you're a half lap out, your caller should instinctually back you off a little to get some margin for error back. If he doesn't, all it takes is a slightly blown line to pylon one or a slight change in wind speed and boom, you post a cut and likely a couple point mistake. Here's two Seaholm-Causey examples of the Conservatively Aggressive Game Plan for your reference. These have 2 significantly different outcomes. In 2008, at the FL Gold Cup we were in the driver's seat going into the final round. We were one point up on the competition and held fast time, our first sub-minute time of 59.56. The initial mistake was a poor needle setting initiated by trying to squeak a little more out of it. Dennis O'Brien and Dubb Jett flat put it on us the first couple laps and our airspeed was down so the chance of catching up was not high. As the heat progressed Dennis and Dub continued to battle for the lead and we were sucking hind tit. About lap 6, Dubb posted a cut. We kept pushing to catch Dennis and also posted a cut turning a 1 point mistake (bad needle setting with the help of Dub's cut) into a 2 point mistake (bad needle and a cut), dropping us out of contention and setting my ME in TEAM into overdrive. After my ME fit resided, usually about 5-10 minutes, Scott and I vowed we'd never give a contest away like that again. Force a fly-off if need be and try to win the contest head to head in overtime. As fate would have it, we faced a very similar situation this year at the FL Gold Cup race. We were again in contention and faced AJ Hemken, defending FL champion and tied with him for first, in our final heat. Hemken cut his opening lap and we went into cruise mode. We were so conservative in an attempt to not repeat the previous year's mistake, Gary Freeman Sr. passed us on lap 9. We dropped a point and my ME meter pegged once again. Scott kept me in line during the heat, tolerated me after the heat, and we stuck to the game plan of forcing a fly-off if need be rather then giving it away. This put us in a tie with Stephen Vaclav who had another heat to go. Stephen cut in his final heat and provided Scott and I with our first big race win. To wrap this section up, fly only as hard as you need to win the heat and don't let 1 point mistakes turn into bigger ones. The Bridge-Flynn Affect At the current level of competition in RC Pylon racing, with the parity in equipment, and pilot skill, you really need a couple breaks to win a big contest. In the previous section I talked about minimizing the impact of mistakes. Well sometimes that impact can be wildly different. For example, at this year's NATS we had a heat where we posted a cut. Fortunately, the other 3 competitors also posted a cut and we were still able to garner 4 points, despite the bone head move. I considered this a break that allowed us a shot at the title. We've had countless other heats where a mistake like this would cost us a couple points. The Bridge-Flynn Affect in my mind is similar to the old adage, “You make your own luck”. During my close observation of Randy and Travis's team dynamic, I often asked other racers why they thought the team was so successful. Many times I heard, “Randy is very lucky”. Huh, I thought, I wonder if he's made some kinda deal with the pylon devil or something to acquire this vast amount of luck. After several seasons watching these two, I began to develop my own explanation of this incredible run of luck. Hence, the Bridge-Flynn Affect. I believe these two are so good and so consistent, they put a ton of pressure on the competition. In other words, one mistake against these two and you're going down a point. Heck, you may not make any mistakes and will likely still go down a point, they're just that good. So, the Bridge-Flynn Affect results in pilots knowing how hard it is to win against these two which creates mistakes and the perception of lucky breaks for Randy and Travis. I believe Scott and I benefited from a similar affect this season. We've been pretty tough, in my opinion, for about a year. We'd won a lot of heat races and placed in the top 7 at most of the big races. I believe this along with a 58.62 time at the FL race helped us with Hemkem in the final heat race. I'm sure he was thinking he needed to nail the first turn and fly almost perfect to take us down leading to a first lap cut, a break for us due in large part to a consistent performance leading up to that heat. So, make your own luck by keeping the pressure on your competition by being consistently tough through minimizing mistake impact. Man, this is starting to sound like I know what I'm talking about, at least in my mind. Staying the course, To Move or Not To Move Another aspect of the Conservatively Aggressive Game Plan is Staying the Course, To Move or Not to Move. If you talk to most experienced pylon racers they'll tell you to hold your line, if you move that's when a mid-air will happen. I've had a lot of experience with mid-airs, in RC Combat it happened all the time and in some cases multiple times in a single heat. Those models are designed to take a beating and keep on ticking, our pylon models are not. Not to mention, there's a pretty substantial investment up there cruising around in a pylon heat. My approach to “Holding Your Line” has a little different and more conservative spin. Having blasted many combat models out of the sky for years, I began to almost see mid-airs coming. Pretty simple really, 2 models going in for a kill on an intersecting flight path and boom, big wreck. It's the same in RC Pylon, if you try to fly the same line as your competitor, sooner or later you'll try to occupy the same space which is followed closely by piece generation. With this little pearl of wisdom, why would you hold your line that may in some cases be the same line as your competitor? There's lots of airspace on the course vertically, why not take advantage of it and reduce your racing expense. Simply put, choose a line above or below you competitors flight path. Then hold your line by controlling your vertical spacing and duke it out for ten laps of clean side by side racing. I began to use the rudder on the simulator to drive the model up or down to find a clean line around the course. This has carried over to the real world with the straights providing the greatest distance to find that vertical spacing to help cut down on collisions. Besides collisions, the other key enemy to pylon racer longevity is bad-air. Bad-air is a formidable foe and can really bite you when following the lead plane through the turns. Bad-air is essentially a big hole punched through the air by our models. Think of drafting in NASCAR. The problem with our style of racing is you rarely hit that hole evenly with both wings. This leads to a violent yaw that usually points you straight at the ground providing just enough reaction time to watch your model turned to a nasty pile of rubble, not good or cheap. An integral part of picking a line is the knowledge of your competitions flying style. I'm going to reuse a comparison from my RC Combat Tactics and Techniques article to illustrate my point. What can I say I'm not that original? In college baseball we used to keep detailed pitch by pitch charts on the opposing pitcher. This included pitch type and location. After a couple innings a definite trend always developed that we as an offense would then try to exploit. In RC Pylon, I've tried to adapt this by observing each pilot's tendencies for choosing an elevation in a close race. Do they stay pinned on the bottom (right at the top of the pylons) or naturally slide up? With this knowledge it takes some of the guess work out of the heat. I prefer 10-15 feet above the top of the pylons as the lead line. In other words, if you can get the lead you will by nature get to pick the line and those following will need to slide up to avoid bad-air. Know your competitors tendencies to determine if this is good plan. A pilot's line will change with time and experience. Newer racers will not hold as consistent a line, which will usually provide you an opening to get around them. Ideally I prefer to pass at Pylon 1 because your field of vision is much greater. For me, pylon 2 and 3 is the most challenging because as you turn your head through this turn your field of vision is very limited. This makes it really easy to misjudge where you're at and fly right into a competitor while trying to squeeze past. Granted, this is all sounds good in theory but until you can hold your line and fly consistent it's not going to provide a lot of benefit. I'll end this article with the basics I've learned over the years to work towards swapping leads with the big dawgs. In summary, hold your own line and work hard to develop a feel for what your competitors' tendencies. This will aid in the development of a Conservatively Aggressive Game Plan before your wheels ever leave the ground. Back to Basics The final section of this article really should be the beginning. With out good fundamentals all the previous information will not provide much benefit. My hope is by flipping the order and writing this section last, perhaps it will be the last thing in your mind the next time you go out to rip it up on the course. Model set-up is a huge part of flying consistently. The faster events in RC Pylon don't provide a whole lot of time to be wrestling your model around the course. So, spend the time to get your bird flying as well as possible. The three trimming basics are described below:
These three trimming basics will help dial that model in and make your job as the pilot much easier. The less you have to fly the model and provide inputs to those little drag makers we call control surfaces, the faster you're going to go. Now that you've nailed your model's set-up it's time to get some laps in. Flying the course is not that hard, flying the course consistently tight and smooth for 10 laps in a row is very challenging. This should be your goal every time out. Smooth is fast. I've adopted the less is more technique when it comes to control throw set-up. This is a widely accepted method for setting up a model in pylon racing for good reason. For one, again smooth is fast, minimizing control movement will scrub less speed and reduce heat times. The second component to the less is more approach to control set-up is the adrenaline factor. It is very probable you can fly rock solid smooth laps with a lot of throw during practice. As soon as that green flag drops, you have adrenalin pumping and precision flying goes out the window. It's far too easy to yank and bank in the heat of battle, therefore the less throw you have the better off you'll be. Minimal control throw is one of the hardest aspects for new pilots to grasp because sport models use a lot of throw and pilots are used to this feel. The most common reply to minimal control is, “I like a lot of throw in case I get into trouble.” I contend, with a lot of control throw you will get into trouble. With minimal throw, there's no need to get out of trouble because you never get there in the first place. Along the lines of minimal control throw is elevator tuning. The elevator sets the radius of your turns. The full pull turn is a must to flying consistently. I tune the elevator for a full pull turn through pylon 2 and 3 and take what I get at pylon 1. This was a new technique for me after my long pylon hiatus but it really works. If you start a full pull turn at pylon 2, pylon 3 will be a no brainer, if and only if you nail pylon 2. So how do you know if you're close to Pylon 2? Get over close to it so you can easily judge your depth from the pole. If you stand up in the middle or further away from the pylon, it's much more challenging to judge your depth. Since this technique requires a close and consistent proximity to pylon 2, or you'll cut 3 every time, get within 20-30 feet of the pole to see what's going on. Now that you've mastered the 2/3 turn it's time for that all important leg from pylon 3 to pylon 1. This leg is very critical because without a consistent distance traveled, you're caller will never be able to really dial you in on pylon 1. The objective here is to fly as straight and as consistent as possible to give your teammate the same look and place to start his cadence lap after lap. If you arc this leg differently each lap, the effective distance traveled changes and the cadence will be wrong leading to a cut. Fly straight, fly fast, give your caller a chance. So a couple paragraphs into this section and your model is flying on rails, you're nailing 2/3, and the straight from 3 to 1 is dead straight. Piece of cake, right? Well actually this will take a great deal of practice to get right. I've benefited a great deal from working on these techniques on a flight simulator. I started with Real Flight G2 and have progressed to Real Flight G4.5. While practicing on the simulator you can record your flights and go back to review where your weaknesses lie. This provides tremendous feedback much like recording your golf swing and reviewing the deficiencies. Simulators also allow you to fly against a recorded model and practice flying different lines. The simulator also allows a great deal of flying to be done in a short period of time without wearing out your equipment. I typically try to log 5-6 heats minimum before going to a contest. I record each heat and fly only 11-12 laps just like a real heat. After each flight I go back and watch each pylon to see how tight I'm flying and then time the heat to give myself a metric to compare the next practice heat too. This allows me to knock some dust off, judge my consistency, and get the all important first lap cadence dialed in. It also helps train my eyes and brain for the speed so the model will start to “slow down”. I'm a big proponent of the use of flight simulators as a practice tool in RC Pylon and believe my flying skill has benefited greatly from its use. RealFlight G4.5 Pylon Files While the flight simulator is useful for working on fine tuning your flying skills, nothing can replace race experience. The adrenaline factor is something you can never replicate with a simulator. It's important you learn to deal with this heightened state of awareness, aka pumped up, the reason we all do this stuff. In my opinion, this can only be learned at the races. Plus, races are a lot of fun and competitors are very enjoyable to spend time with so get out there and experience the action. The final basic I'll discuss in this article is the first lap turn. I believe most races are won or lost on the first lap and a great deal of simulator practice time should be devoted to trying to master this lap. As pilots, Scott and I are responsible for getting around pylon 1 on the first lap. There are a couple reasons for this. One, if you as a caller has to stand there after launch and call the turn it's a long run back to get to your pilot. This often times leaves you out of position as a caller for the second lap which is nearly as crucial as the first. The other problem with the caller calling the first lap is the take off itself. As a pilot you can seen how smoothly you've climbed out or the line you're taking to pylon one. It's much harder for the caller to judge this change in distance flown. So, we use a “2-3-4-Ready-Turn” cadence for the first lap. In Q-500 I start the cadence when the wheels leave the ground. In Q-40, I start this cadence as soon as Scott starts his push. Try to take off low and flat to minimize the distance traveled. Scott yells my first name when the pylon 1 light turns on. As the pilot I use this verbal feedback to judge and adjust my first lap cadence to really dial it in on the pole. The first lap is so critical because it's so much easier to get through pylons 2/3 without having to follow someone through there, establish a different line, and deal with those big holes in the air. Well, I believe I've rambled enough. Again, my hope is this will benefit the racing community. These techniques are by no means my own, they're simply a compilation of many years of experience that has been so graciously shared with me over the last 6 seasons following my re-entry into pylon racing. My suggestion is you read this throw and try to extract a couple pieces of useful information. Go out and apply those techniques to your next race or practice day. Come back to this article in the future and try pull out a couple more useful bits of information. In time I'm confident you'll see your point counts going up and your times trending down. If you have any questions or comments about this article, don't hesitate to contact me at seaholm@teamseaholm.com . Race hard and have fun. |
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