Some one told me the contest pilots will cross the finish at 180 and do a 5 g vertical pull up while voiding ballast "So they can get to pattern altitude " Which if you are not a designer is a good excuse.
(Sorry, OT)
We crossed the finish line at the redline speed of the glider or less. Going faster than that and having a flutter incident in ground effect would be a very big mess on the runway with a pilot-colored streak in the asphalt. We all wore parachutes, so if you did an overspeed and fluttered your airplane apart at altitude you would more or less easily be able to get out of it.
BUT... the faster you crossed the finish line, the more altitude you had to gain somewhere that you really didn't need. So the (really fun, show-off) high speed low finish was actually an admission that you had spent too much time climbing in the last thermal.
(Matter of fact, the only time I ever got my license taken by the feds was because of one of these low-altitude ego-trips. It was admittedly dangerously low and completely un-necessary, just practicing for a contest at what I thought was a mostly abandoned desert airport. One of the glider instructors, a nice guy named Tom Dickenson, was walking with his wife, and I didn't see them. Never did see them. But apparently I went by them at or slightly below eye level, and Tom's wife soiled herself and fell down, getting mud and dirt on her clothes, and pissed of Tom pretty bad. Nobody ever said anything, and I just went on with my life until the phone rang with the FSDO on the other end...
)
It's been a long time, but If memory serves, I believe that a perfectly efficient contest finish would be that you crossed the finish line at the optimum inter-thermal "speed to fly" that was calculated (or provided by a whiz-bang device) for that day.
The late great Helmut Reichmann, in his seminal book "Cross Country Soaring", put it best: "After all, the altitude for this airshow has to be gained somewhere..."
Pulling 5G puts a huge amount of drag on the airplane, which means you'd get to a lower altitude than if you did a smooth low-G pull up. I never did anywhere near that. Maybe 2 or 2.5. For the 1980's era 15 meter gliders (assuming we kept all of the water ballast for the whole flight) coming across the finish line at just about 0 feet AGL and 140 MPH, doing a mild pull-up, we'd easily get back up to 1000-1200 feet AGL.
That wasn't just pattern altitude, that was almost high enough to start out on another cross-country
