I was so excited to sign up for my first quad race ever! A few guys from the local community set up a whoop race in a nearby town and I kinda randomly stumbled upon this event on Facebook, so I decided to give it a go. Considering my experience, I was not expecting any good results - and surely enough I didn't get them My final result was 16th place out of 22 pilots. Well I wasn't the last, yahoo! The track was pretty difficult (even the pros said so) and I was the last one who actually finished at least two consecutive laps. The record was 4 laps. Time limit 2:30 minutes per heat.
But by far the biggest win for me in this event is that I finally found some flying buddies. It's quite difficult for me to find people to fly with since I live in Finland, but I don't speak the language - so I have to rely on English. But the folks there were super nice and I got invited to a Slack channel where they organise meetups, so I'm quite positive I won't have to be flying alone till the rest of my days

Anyway, here's the video of my best lap. Winner of the event did his fastest lap in about half the time

Well done  I thought you did a good job of getting round that course

I don't think I'd ever be brave enough to enter any type of competition like that, even if I thought I might be remotely good enough.

What type of whoops were people generally flying, or was there quite a mixture?

Quite difficult but you did a better job than I think I would do, I think I would miss more gates since I tend to fly faster and on 2S.
I'm interested too in getting to know what type of whoops were used

The only limitation was to fly 1S, so there was a multitude of different drones to be seen. I was flying UR65, then there were two Tinyhawks, a few BetaFPV models and then pelnty of different custom brushed models people built themselves. I was actually pretty unhappy with my setup as I was running 4 blade props, so the battery suffered. I'm not sure if I would even be able to run 3 laps on my battery with that setup.

And I can only recommend entering any competition or meetup like this, even if you think you're not good enough pilot. Unless it's some crazy serious league thing, people will be supportive and cheer for you and support you even if you crash into every possible obstacle on the way. This event only confirmed for me that the community around this hobby is simply awesome.

That's cool man. No flying buddies around here yet.

Deal

Great job. Just staying airborne and getting through a lap can be half the battle.