Back on the spreadsheeting nerdiness, you actually had the "luck" of making a debut in one of the most extreme route-planning events, the hunting fields of the min-maxing gods like Alot, Bruski or Cookiehole (purely in alphabetic order), but we also had (and will have...don't we?) several more linear races. I for once have a liking for the simpler, fixed route and closed track courses (totally not related to being crap at optimal route plotting [yesnod]).
You know what, I'm not big on races which require complex route plotting either! The funny this is, when I came up with this race idea I just thought - "oooh, racing against an Oxygen countdown and certain death if you don't get back in time ... that'd be cool!". Even after my test runs I just thought that people would dive in, pick a few remote stations and then pit themselves against the clock. Once again I totally underestimated the amount of spreadsheeting and general back-of-envelope scribbling that people would do to optimise their route, and how vital to getting a winning time that would be. The people that won flew a great race but I think they'd be the first to admit that they won primarily because of the route they chose. Must confess I didn't see that coming. Doh! (sorry).
I've got another SRV race idea in the pipeline which is basically a straightforward extreme terrain base jump, first to the bottom wins, kinda thing. I'm gonna say this now ... I don't want to see ANYONE producing 3D vector terrain maps and running complex algorithms to calculate the optimum descent route ... I just want people to leap into their SRV, hurl themselves off the mountain and use raw skill to make it to the bottom fast and in one piece. Ya hear me! Strictly no nerds allowed!!!
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