Quote:
Originally Posted by Michael Moore
^^^^ what jkv357 said. Holding a fuel efficiency competition with no real control over the amount of fuel people are using is senseless. You may as well just let people guess what their mileage was and use those numbers to decide who wins.
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I'm not against a more accurate fuel measurement for the ride. However, to assume that this event has a bunch of novices that don't know what they're doing when it comes to topping off consistently; that we're not very accurate or consistent in our top off method; and that we've got to protect ourselves from a bunch of serious fuel misers coming in and being careless and/or dishonest and stealing the show is not even close to what happens at either of the two challenges that I've attended.
That's just not a good representation of what's going on. I've watched some of this topping off and discussions about topping off; all these guys have a proven system and they're just as anal as I am about this; and we're all likely just as consistent and just as committed to reporting an accurate result as I am. In fact, this is much more important than the competition to most of us I think. I believe Sendler may have seen some funny stuff; either careless or dishonest, but at the two I've attended, I've witnessed just the opposite.
I trust Scott, Ben, Fred, Vic, Alan, Paul, Nate, Finnie, and myself totally on this point. I'm not just referring to integrity; I'm also referring to accuracy. I trust that if any one of us gets an unexpected result that each of us would communicate that to others. I've seen this happen twice. Once from myself in 2014 and another rider in 2017. Any large variation from what we expect on mpg will be most pronounced to us personally, because we're so anal this way; we know our rides best and what we should be able to achieve. I was going around in 2014 telling anyone who would listen that I wasn't happy with my great score, because I shouldn't have done that well. I was disappointed really. I didn't want it to look like that I don't know what I'm doing or was being dishonest.
I witnessed a rider this year do the same thing. When I asked him, he immediately started talking about it. He was not nearly as happy with his high score as everyone else seemed to be for him, because it was too large of an unexpected jump I assume, and of course I could relate, because in 2014, I was hoping to get my best tank ever, but I did not want or expect to get 13-14 mpg higher than my best tank; and that sort of thing doesn't really make anal folks like us happy. We want something that make sense. We want things to be explained. In my case, it could not have been top off error and I knew it. The tank before mpg and the tank after mpg were normal. I couldn't figure it out and still don't know what happened on that ride. This year, everyone's error could be exaggerated by the short ride and maybe that's what happened. I'm guessing that if you're topping back up with as little as .40 gallon, any error could be exaggerated. But this is no reflection on the filler upper. That person knows how to do this accurately and consistently, and I've never witnessed these so-called pump errors that exist from my experiences filling up. I've experienced some gas being worse than others, but not variations in pumps; or even from the same pump. Maybe others have, but I've not.