As
My suggestions:
1. Having a held start would be a great improvement.
2. For the race grid and rankings, spread out the out-of-town teams into different heats. The grid can take one surprise in a heat but two doesn't work so well. Specific example: NY and Topmade surprised in Heat 10 in the first round resulting in 4 comp-level teams in one heat instead of 2. That fed into Heat 41 in the second round where there is only supposed to be 1 or 2 comp-level teams and there were 4 (Calgary Race Club, JDA, Eye of the Dragon, and Xtreme Reach). CRC went on to Comp and the other 3 from that heat went on to sweep the medals in Rec A easily, taking the medals from the Rec teams.
Thanks for the chance to give feedback.
I agree that a held start would be a great improvement but that would mean changing the start and finish lines around ... something they do for the Taiwanese festival but they don't for Alcan ... I think this has more to do with location and room to set up a racer's village/stage/beer garden/ etc ...
Overall I liked the race grid. It was disappointing to come in third our first race and get relegated to the Rec Division. As soon as we found out that we would have to fight our way back into the Comp division it allowed our team to get focused and get to work. I think it was great! Often it's come to a regatta on Saturday and the standing will be figured out later. Instead every raced counted which made it that great to be apart of.
Last year we came in second twice in our first two races in Kelowna. We got relegated to Jade Division. Then we won Jade Division by almost a full boat length ... it didn't seem fair to the other teams. This allowed a team that wanted to be in Comp a chance to work themselves back into it after a very tough first race grouping.
I hope they keep this format.
Great Job this year.
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