Lap Racing. Fun. Fast. Spectator friendly.
Home of Paragliding Short Circuit Lap Racing. A new race / training format and fun way to sharpen your paragliding skills.
Paragliding Short Circuit Lap Racing
- Fun for pilots and spectators
- <15min race time
- Various standard tasks
- Train for speed and precision
- Start Gate Practice
- Turnpoint efficiency
- Navigate airspace
- Score your performance
- Compare with friends
- Global rankings
The Concept
Fun for Everyone.
If you have an instrument capable of setting up a task and handling airspace this might just be an activity for you.
Newcomers
Use PG Laps to get used to setting up tasks, airspaces and adjust your instruments. Learn to follow a task and avoid airspace.
Comp Pilots
Fly laps as a tiny race and refine your competition skills. Start on time. Push that bar. Turn at waypoints without loosing time. Follow airspace tightly without entering.
Hunters
We are setting up an automatic scoring facility. So crank up the speed, upload your tracklogs and compete against your own record, your club or the global ladder.
Why you should.
Lap Racing aims to be a few things:
- Training ground for your next comp.
Laps are specifically designed to simulate challenges typically encountered in a comp. - Fast and accessible.
Laps can be setup on any take-off and – if you can climb 1000m – you can train laps continuously. - Spectator and media friendly.
By flying in a smaller arena this format lends itself for spectators to watch and TV coverage to be done.
- Step 1. Find a task to fly in our Task Library
- Step 2. Download Task and Airspace
- Step 3. Prep your instrument
- Step 4. Fly the Task
- Step 5. Upload Results, Measure and Compare
Getting Started
…still not sure? Visit our detailed Getting Started Guide
No tasks at your site? Set one up.
Frequently Asked Questions
If you want to fly one of the standard tasks at your local site, the task needs to be transposed to your local flying arena.
Please follow our Setup Guide for the detailed steps.
To enable a fair competition at a local but also global level across different PG sites, we believe it is critical that the exact same task is flown by all pilots, albeit in different countries all over the world. To ensure true task equality we decided to opt for a centralised model and for creating the official race files centrally. That way we can ensure that everyone flying a “Mini Task v01” is actually flying the exact same task.
…couldn’t I just create my own Lap Task for training? Well, you can! 100%.
The reason for a (set of) standard lap tasks is that it is necessary for gamification. Having standard lap tasks allows comparing the performance of pilots locally, nationally and globally, which turns this mini-race into a global and hopefully inspiring competition.
At this stage the scoring software automatically takes your last departure of the start cylinder as the relevant start for the flight. To fly multiple laps you need to manually shutdown/restart your gps tracking software (XCTrack properly wraps up running tracks when shutting down) in order to create multiple scorable lap tracklogs during one single flight.
The scoring software is clever enough to only score airspace (i.e. obstacle) violations while you are on course. So if you fly into the airspace while you making height initially, nothing should happen at all. If however you violate the obstacles after you left the start cylinder a zero score is applied.
Please visit our Scoring page to get set up. Each task has a scoring section at the bottom with the relevant links to upload your flights.
Well done! Please contact us with an image and description of your lap task and why you believe this should be an official lap task. We will get in touch to discuss this with you. When you describe your task, let us know what the “features” are – waypoint sizes, turning-angles, special airspace configurations etc.
Not yet. But please feel free to send us your files to info@pglaps.com and we will do our best to establish a simple community area for pilots to share their creations.
The initial MiniTask format was built based on the criteria outlined under Concept . The intent was to build a closed loop that incorporates all waypoint angles and airspace scenarios.
We plan to charge a small setup fee for a lap task listing for two reasons:
- To ensure the tasks submitted are thought through by the pilots and submissions are serious about the setup and
- to recover some of our time investment required to properly configure each task, transpose the original template, transpose the airspace and to (manually) establish the waypoints, task and airspace within the scoring facility.