Older Gliders on Steroids: Some implications for handicap racing
By Val Brain Posted: April 26 2005
The article describes the Cirrus wings as “an old, thick, non-laminar design.” The Wortmann glider wing sections of the 1960s and 1970s were of course the leading laminar flow airfoils of the era, following the Eppler sections which preceding them. The Skylarks I was flying in the 1950s used the first laminar flow sections, which were much thicker than the sections used by the Olympia and the Sky, and by the 1960s lamina flow sections were being used by all competitive sailplanes, including the Austrias. All the early fiberglass sailplanes used laminar flow sections. With the Ventus and later ASW-20s, laminar flow sections became a lot thinner, made possible by carbon fiber technology, but the Standard Cirrus was no slouch in the 1970s.
But no matter; we should be impressed that the application of deturbulator tape to the wings of these older gliders may radically improve their performance – not enough to make them competitive with the latest designs, but enough to make them completely outclass others of the same model they are competing with in handicapped competition. And there’s the rub. Handicaps are established by test and consensus, and unless gliders have been modified in clearly advantageous ways, such as by adding longer tips or adding winglets, they are not penalized. The Sports Class, and the Club Class in world competition, attempt to be like a one-design class in which the differing performance of gliders is taken out of the equation. Radically improving the performance of a Sports or Club Class glider and entering it as if unmodified is as unethical as the use of performance enhancing drugs by athletes. There is no way in which the increase in performance for every modification can be estimated. We assign different handicap factors to 15 and 18 meter versions and sometimes to A, B, and C models, if they incorporate new wing sections or other advantages, but modifications added by individual owners are just too much to fool with and have to be excluded from competition. If they restore an old design to close to state-of-the-art performance, the proud owner can go back to the FAI class in which the glider originally competed – and the best of luck!What do you think? Email Val Brain at brain@towson.edu.
