Winning strategies

Measured in percent · lower is better

Time that goes into neither a climb nor progress down the course. This is the time spent to find lift, to stay up, and to decide what to do next. The value is the share of the speed-section time, from the start to ESS or to the landing, in which the pilot neither climbed in a thermal nor glided with real net speed. A lower value means less time lost between climbs.

Measured in ratio · no expected direction

How optimistic the pilot was about their final glide. A pilot wins or loses a task by the height at which they leave the last climb. At the last climb of the pilot before goal, or before the landing, we divide the distance still to fly to goal, through every turnpoint not yet reached, by their height above goal. That is the glide ratio they committed to. 8 means they left and needed 8:1 to make goal. The value counts only when that climb ended within 1.5 times the length of the last course leg longer than 1 km from goal — when ESS and goal share a waypoint, the zero-length hop between them is not that leg. There is no expected direction: a marginal glide wins if it connects, and loses if it does not. We also give the ratio through the air. The pilot’s own last climb measured the wind, and we remove its effect over the time the glide took. A tailwind makes the glide easier than the number over the ground, and a headwind makes it harder.

Measured in ratio · higher is better

Whether the pilot found better air on glide than the other pilots on the same leg. For each completed speed-section leg, we take the pilot's glide-phase L/D. That is the path distance divided by the net altitude lost during the glides, and we skip a leg that loses less than 100 m. We divide it by the median L/D of the field on that same leg, and then average over the legs. 1.10 means the pilot glided 10% further for each metre lost than the usual pilot on those legs.

Measured in percent · no expected direction

Whether the pilot raced with other pilots or alone. The value is the share of their flying time after the start inside a detected gaggle, that is, clustered with one other racing pilot or more on the shared time grid. There is no expected direction. A gaggle increases the power to search for lift, but it also holds a pilot to its own speed. The sign of the correlation says which of the two occurred here.

Measured in percent · no expected direction

How selective the pilot is about the lift they stop for. Each period of circling of 30 s or more after the start counts as lift that the pilot sampled. If the period overlaps a detected thermal, the pilot kept that lift. If it does not, they turned a few circles and left it. The value is the percentage kept. A low value means they are selective. A high value means they keep almost every climb they turn in. There is no expected direction: selection wins on a strong day and wastes time on a weak one.