As well as the usual routine of being crazy busy in work the last few months seem to have had weekend after weekend of F3F. And so it was that after seven days of competition in Slovakia the weekend after we got back it was Welsh Open time.
The weather forecast was absolutely fantastic, but not for F3F. Had it not been a competition day you probably wouldn't have even bothered to charge your gear with only 2 or 3 mph of variable direction wind being forecast. Both Saturday and Sunday we were greeted with not a breath but Andrzej and myself, who were sharing the CD's duties, had seen it all before and were able to make pretty educated guesses about how things were likely to pan out.
A bit of sound judgement and a hint of luck took us to the right hills both days and we were able to eke out one and a half rounds on Saturday and the same on Sunday. Sadly though as we were part way through round four the conditions dropped altogether leaving us with only three completed rounds and therefore no official Eurotour result. Bums.
As you can imagine with only three rounds in light and thermic conditions the results were a bit of a mixed bag. Having said that credit is of course due to the top guys who made great use of any air they had. Come the final reckoning it was great to see a new name on the trophy, especially as it was John Phillips who had been part of the luckless GBR team in Slovakia. John flew a Masterpiece, Espen, in second, flew a Ceres as did Pierre in third.
On the plus side we actually did rather well to get three rounds from 45 pilots given the conditions. It also shows the value of restricting the entry to a sensible number from the over 100 applicants that we had. It may also be the inspiration to go all coastal in 2009...
Results
1 John Phillips 2798.45 2 Espen Torp 2793.67 3 Pierre Rondel 2728.32 4 Mark Southall 2723.23 5 Mark Redsell 2684.15 6 John McCurdy 2651.75 7 Greg Dakin 2622.83 8 Jon Edison 2585.77 9 Angus Lee 2584.05 10 Andrzej Tabero 2583.81 11 Carlos Cantero 2577.62 12 Franz Demmler 2567.80 13 Ronny Sandslett 2566.97 14 Graham Reed 2559.79 15 Mark Passingham 2550.00 16 Mike Shellim 2539.55 17 Peter Gunning 2516.02 18 Ian Mason 2515.66 19 Ronald Broughton 2484.85 20 Mike Evans 2464.66 21 Mark Abbotts 2451.09 22 Tom Macpherson 2443.17 23 Andy West 2422.22 24 Fernando del Barrio Moreno 2414.41 25 Tom Erik Smedal 2379.66 26 Keith Wood 2371.21 27 Steve Clutterbuck 2363.97 28 José Luis Alvarez 2353.11 29 Reto Fiolka 2343.22 30 Mick Walsh 2339.81 31 Mike Young 2334.76 32 Tom Noble 2330.59 33 Joel West 2325.71 34 Kevin Newton 2323.50 35 C M Cheng 2292.22 36 Mark Freeman 2280.29 37 Gary Harrison 2276.86 38 Ken Woodhouse 2253.52 39 Paul Jubb 2228.70 40 Julian Perrott 2218.99 41 Richard Bago 2198.67 42 Wing Wong 2012.42 43 Vic Eldridge 1887.89 44 Frank Hulton 1555.32 45 Stefan Bertschi 1516.23 Teams 1 Big Air Team 7688.99 2 teamfast2furious.com 7643.78 3 GoFast TurnHard 7639.34 4 Dreaming Team 7511.39 5 Swillers 7426.35 6 The Southern Numpties 7405.90 7 Muppetts 7283.26 8 SWSA 7244.28 9 Wales Z 6990.73 10 Hong Kong 6888.69 11 Team Rejects 6646.44 12 TopMiBot 6370.37
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