2015 Team Selections

San Simeon, CA – Wicked Sister site

The team selection contest took place on September 11th-13th 2015 at San Simeon in Central California. The team selections committee chose this location to most mimic the upcoming 2016 World Championships in Denmark, as it is a small seaside slope.

We had a total of 15 pilots vying for 3 team spots. Warren Day was generous enough to donate his time to organize the contest, and Bill DelHagen was also generous to step up to be the Contest Director.

The plan was to get as many rounds in as we could, and we had 3 days on the calendar to do so. We ended up only having two of those days because conditions were not so good.

Friday September 10th : Practice day. Many pilots showed up for some practice at the slope, as there are not many times to fly this location due to wildlife preserve issues, and we had few permits. We waited until late afternoon about 4 o’clock before we could fly, and many of us were able to get in good flights before the contest.

Saturday September 11th : First day of the competition. Unfortunately, the wind gods were not cooperating, and wind levels did not show up till late afternoon and were soft at best. We started on a building wind, so the first pilots ended up being at a bit of a disadvantage. After a few rounds, the wind started to shift north, which also made for some difficult flights, till it was eventually not flyable.

Sunday September 12th : The forecast didn’t look good, but we were surprised with decent wind direction and enough wind to fly a bit later in the afternoon. We were able to get in 6 rounds before calling it an evening, which put us at a total of 10 rounds. Because of the extremely poor forecast for Sunday, we decided to call the contest, and the first three pilots would be the team.

A summary of the result can be found on F3XVault, here, but here is a summary :

1 Kyle Paulson
2 Brandon Monte
3 Steve Situm
4 Mehrdad Amir
5 David Cortina
6 Dave Freund
7 Ken Gregory
8 Tim Traver
9 Warren Day
10 Loren Mills
11 Dan Field
12 Bob Mietzner
13 Scott Thomason
14 David Olson
15 Lance Gromachey

Congratulations to the team of Kyle Paulson, Brandon Monte, and Steve Situm, with the Alternate pilots of Mehrdad Amir, and David Cortina!

 

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