Thanks everyone for your nice comments on here and via email, etc. Glad you're enjoying the race, I'm really enjoying running it.
I'd still like to have a shot at the Spa Trophy, but I'll probably have to leave my run until this weekend, as I've got to admit I never actually imagined it as a 3+ hour journey! I'll struggle to find time on a work night (although I could update the board and watch a movie during the super-cruise I guess).
Alternatively, I might sneak in and try to grab the "Best Trader League" while no one's watching!
I think ive been lucky with interdictions, ive had one I evaded in 6 attempts..
don't quote me on this but I heard the higher your combat rank the less chance you have of being interdicted..
im dangerous so im not sure if that's helping me, I try and just show my backside to the star for a third of the arc to the station.. whenever I just head for it.. I give the npcs more time to dict me. so by arcing, on the last half of the journey the newly spawned npcs at the star cant get behind you. you can still get dicted though as npcs can just spawn in behind you at any time from created signal sources, another tip would be try and spend less time in SC and avoid systems where npcs have already been created by other players.. so busy systems.. i.e. lave and leesti.
My experiences are similar to robinjb's, I don't tend to get interdicted very often by NPCs. If I'm concerned about any NPCs behind me I drop under the systems orbital plane and approach the planet/station from below. NPCs who aren't after you obviously don't follow you down and it keeps your tail turning away from pursuers while you decelerate.
When I did quite a few smuggling missions in the week before robinjb's warm-up race, I did notice that NPCs who are specifically generated to interfere with your mission are often waiting close to the planet/station rather than the star. These are obviously going to be harder to avoid unless you are really good at timing gravity braking perfectly. It's probably better to overshoot and come back around than to get stranded in the gravity well at 100m/s.
The supply of commodities is quite low, at least for the larger ships. With my route, the larger ships (that need to bring 64t at minimum) wouldn't even be able to qualify. Heck, I was afraid my Asp wouldn't be able to qualify until the seventh stop, where I was finally able to stock up to a total of more than 30t.
I've found that if you're visiting several stations you can usually expect your rares-spawns to average out at just over half the maximum from a single spawn in each station. The screenshots and videos that I've received for this race seem to back up my own findings.
Running the shortest possible route in the race (in LY), between stations within a reasonable distance of the entry point you'd expect to gather just over 50 tons from a single spawn at each station. You'd also expect a similar amount from the Black Riband run (which has a max of 91t). So running one of the heavy ships through either route, you'd probably need to revisit one or two stations to fill up unless you got lucky spawns with a couple of the commodities with higher caps.
There are routes available that are a similar length to the Black Riband run that are more than likely to spawn at least 64 tons though, so an Anaconda run of less than an hour is certainly possible. The other big ships are too short ranged to put in a really fast run anyway.
The thing is though that rares trading is nearly all done by ships ranging from Haulers up to Asps, as the Type-7s, Clippers, Pythons, etc can do better by just grinding out profits with their huge holds. I think that the race kind of reflects that, because any of the heavy ships should be able to easily beat any ship from the lighter classes in the "Best Trader" event.
Anyway, I've made a bit of profit with my two runs (and the botched runs I did, I forgot to make a few screens here and there). I think I might buy and kit out an Eagle and use that to do a run for Mrs. Lonnegan.
Good luck with your Spa Trophy Run.
By the way, if you can set up Shadowplay (nvidia) or Raptr (AMD) to record your runs, then you never need to worry about missing screenshots, you can just grab the screens from your recorded run later even if you aren't planning to upload your video recording. I know that it's not much help if your pc struggles with the game anyway, but Shadowplay has minimal overheads as its hardware based I believe, and Raptr seems to have very little impact when I run it for my AMD card.
