It was the first of the Finals rounds today (Set Manoeuvres) with the top 10 pilots making it through. For anyone unsure of how the scoring works, all of the Preliminary rounds are amalgamated into one score (with the lowest being dropped) and those scores are then normalised to 1000. A Final Sets round plus Freestyle and Music are then flown and the lowest of them plus the Preliminary amalgamated score is eliminated leaving the 3 highest scoring rounds to be added together.
After a morning spent working hard at the practise site, we headed to the competition site around 1pm. Stu was up first. He was happy with his flight and we eagerly awaited his scores. Summer was up a couple of pilots later and also put in a good flight. Both Stu and Summer were disappointed with their scores as they felt they had done better than the last Sets round but the scores were lower.
Both Tillmann and Luca put in good rounds and Tillmann took an early lead. Duncan was up 7th and flew the best round of sets I have ever seen him fly. He stormed into the lead with a raw score of 4055 - an incredibly high score and well deserved. Rasmus was next to fly. He also flew an impressive flight, putting himself in 2nd place in this round ahead of Tillmann and Luca. Dave was our final pilot to fly - he was also a little disappointed with his scores but with Duncan scoring as highly as he did, it is looking likely that this round (once normalised) will be the one that will be dropped.
So for this round Duncan came 1st, Stu 7th, Dave 8th and Summer 9th. The Danish team are now one point ahead of the GBR team but it is still too early to call which team will come out on top.
With the round complete, we partook of some Danish fruit salad (laid on by the organisers) before heading back to the practise site. Tomorrow's forecast is looking wet until mid-afternoon so we're unsure how this will affect the running order. If F3C is too delayed, F3N may end up flying two rounds on Saturday instead of one on Friday & one on Saturday. We'll have to wait & see what happens in the morning. We're all looking forward to a slightly later start tomorrow due to the rain..
Julie Fisher
F3N TM