Congratulations to Ryan Shaw, flying a Dudek Hadron 20, for winning the February Salton Sea Competition with a world-class time on his second round cloverleaf of 43.8 seconds. That’s fast. Mathieu Roaunet, flying an Ozone Speedster 19, also turned in his usual impressive times but missed a stick on round one and entered wrong on round 2, probably because of our cloverleaf’s weird look. It was a standard sized cloverleaf but two corners were 25 foot pylons (courtesy Paramania).
The most impressive aspect of Ryan’s showing was the world standard cloverleaf that allows fairly direct comparison of skills and he ran an extremely fast 43.8 seconds on round 2. Mathieu was consistently fast with two 44 second times. Emilia Plak, on an 18 meter Ozone Viper 1, had the third best cloverleaf time of 47 seconds.
The caliber of pilots at this competition was extremely high and kudos to Greg Bishop who took on the task with a trike. There are a number of difficulties in flying a trike that make it harder to do well but Greg did a good job with it. If we ever get enough trikes, they would separated out in their own category.