hnpcc | more rambling on the Chase/Max difference

So feeling in a slightly better mood this morning I thought about it some more (long commute).

I guess an advantage of having more challenges is that you spread the teams out a bit more. I'm not sure how well that works with huge numbers of teams - according to Nick the Canadian the Toronto challenge had 1000 teams last time, I can't see there not being long queues unless the number of checkpoints was increased substantially. We had 14-15 checkpoints for 100 teams - you'd want at least 30-40 and even then you'd have queues happening (we queued at Melbourne Gaol and at the Boxing. We were lucky to miss queues at the Bollywood dancing, the Nokia ball throwing and the Operation game.) The problem is still if you have a cluster of checkpoints and a couple of outliers then the queues are going to be massive in the clusters, and you can't just do outliers as there's not enough of them. Not sure how you get around that.

And of course it's not like the Urban Max didn't have queues - Melbourne, with similar numbers of teams to this year's Chase, was pretty good, but Sydney - with 600-odd teams - was feral, particularly at time-limited checkpoints. Time-limiting is a problem with both events, if you have to be at a certain place between certain hours you're pretty much guaranteed huge queues. And of course where all teams need to complete all checkpoints, that becomes a bigger issue than where teams can just skip it and hope for a shorter queue at the next one.

The luck factor with the FF still irritates me a bit. Generally speaking the good luck/bad luck spread across the urban max is fairly even - you catch a train/tram/bus, you miss one - it all evens out in the end. Whereas you catch the Volvo (or other named sponsor) car and you're suddenly massively ahead. I'd be interested to know how many of the top 20 teams caught a lift and how many didn't.

Interestingly (OK only to me) the top team finished in 2hr 44min 03 sec. The second team was 6 minutes behind them. We actually finished in 4 hours 31 min 16 seconds (damn, we could have made it 4 hours, 31 min straight if we'd bothered running the last couple of metres from the tram stop! Heh.) So we were nearly 2 hours behind the winners - damn Albert Park! (OK, and the dithering at the start. We really got off to a slow start this year for some reason - possibly the torrential rain disorienting us. I mean water! Falling! From the sky! It's the Apocalypse!) There's 27 teams listed as DNF, which is a bit sad.

And my favourite team name so far: "We Thought It Was A Flashmob." Heh.

The "keeping the endpoint secret" still irritates me for its pointlessness.

Oh well, next year. Any Melburnians want to be on standby as "members of the general public?" ;-)