This was our first crawling competition at RC Arena! Thank you to everyone who showed up, competed, and to those who came to support and spectate! It was really fun to bring the community together and test out our skills. In this competition, we had three classes: Class 1 – Stock-ish Vehicle, Class 2 – Stock Modified, and Class 3 – Unlimited. Detailed rules can be found here. We had 5 participants in Class 1, 9 in Class 2, and 4 in Class 3. Some participants took part in two classes, bringing the total number of drivers to 16.
As RC Arena’s first crawling competition, I learned a lot. First, I am glad I created an app; I found that the other app I saw in the app store wasn’t exactly what I wanted, so I developed an app to track the points. Initially, we used both apps, but mine worked best for our purposes, so we relied on it for the rest of the competition. However, this had some limitations as it is not yet published, so only I could record the scores. Lesson learned: Be ready beforehand and have other judges to keep the competition moving along.
Courses
We have four small courses at RC Arena, so I initially thought it would be better to connect them to create a larger course. Originally, I was thinking of connecting all four as one big course, but on the day of the competition, as everyone arrived, I realized that it would be too much time spent on the “one course,” resulting in a lot of waiting around. So, we decided to use two courses with a small bridge between two of them. This made it so that there were, on average, around 14 gates to go through. Class 1 had fewer gates on the second section of the first course as there were two difficult spots that couldn’t be climbed. Class 3 had one less gate in the second section of the second course, but they did have a bonus gate for an extra 10 points! Splitting the courses also allowed those waiting to play on the other courses while they waited.
Results
Since I created an app, all results were being saved to a database, I wanted to have the results displayed as they were recorded but didn’t have that part of the cycle completed yet. It took me a couple of days, mostly because we had other groups coming in the next few days, to get the scores posted. Since it took a little longer and not everyone was able to stay to run both courses, I have tracked them as Course 1 with Class 1-3 and Course 2 with Class 1-3 separate. Below are the results:
