Bad weather ruins preparations for the penultimate Red Bull Air Race of the 2009 season.
For the second day in a row the fog hanging over Portugal’s Atlantic coast refused to lift, leaving the 15 pilots of the Red Bull Air Race unable to practice ahead of Saturday’s qualification session.
With Thursday’s training sessions cancelled, it had been hoped the ceiling might lift and some activity would be possible on Friday. If anything conditions worsened over night, and those arriving at the temporary runway in the early morning were greeted by the sort of billowing gloom usually reserved for a Hammer Horror graveyard sequence.
The organisers optimistically rescheduled the start time over and over again, but by the time the football appeared out on the runway, and the commentators tried their hands at doing doughnuts in the safety car, it was pretty obvious nothing was going to happen.
The pictures beamed back to the TRW from the racecourse showed the bridges of Porto shrouded in mist. All the scene needed was the mournful howl of a foghorn and it could have been San Francisco in winter rather than the Iberian peninsula in late summer. But even when visibility did improve over the river valley, problems back at the runway precluded any running.
The problem, explained championship leader Paul Bonhomme, was that, while conditions could be fine over the runway and over the course, the fog wasn’t moving off the ocean, and as the planes would have to make their approach from that direction, it wouldn’t be possible to land.
Daniel Grund/Red Bull Photofiles
In most sports a lack of practice would favour the more experienced competitors, but at the Red Bull Air Race the course, while following the same general layout, is never the same twice. “We’ll get there and hope what we see looks something like the sketch we have in the briefing notes – but that isn’t always the case,” says Nigel Lamb.
There are various rules and regulations that outline a procedure should qualification or the race be cut short. These include doing away with some of the intermediate rounds, with the ultimate shortened form of the sport being a one-run winner-takes-all race. Hopefully it won’t come to that – but it has happened before.
Late in the afternoon, after a meeting, the pilots flew off to a commercial airport in Maia. If the track is clear and the ceiling sufficiently high, they should be able to take off and land there to ensure qualification goes ahead.
The one plane that didn’t join the migrating flock was that of Glen Dell. The South African’s aircraft was deemed to not be airworthy by RBAR’s technical director Adrian Judd. Quite what the problem is has not be disclosed, but Dell’s team are far from happy with the judgment.
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