This thread is for those of us interested in growing the ESK8 Racing Scene! As the President of RipTide Sports, Inc., I am deeply involved with many aspects of racing skateboards. ESK8 Racing represents some unique challenges that need to be addressed so that it can grow so I will list what I see holding the sport back and I invite you all to add to these challenges in the hope we will find ways to overcome them.
ESK8 Racing includes but is not restricted to on road and offroad track racing, hill climbs, endurance events, stage rallies, drag racing, dual slalom, downhill and cross country disciplines.
1: Replaceable battery modules: Rack mounted battery modules that lock in place and can be easily removed and replaced during an event. Recharging your board at an event is slow and dangerous if pushed too hard. You spend more time recharging than you do competing. A solution for this will make hillclimbs, endurance events and many other events a reality.
2: Bulletproof electronics: There are three principles of Systems design in reliability engineering which can help achieve high availability.
A. Elimination of single points of failure. This means adding redundancy to the system so that failure of a component does not mean failure of the entire system.
B. Reliable crossover. In redundant systems, the crossover point itself tends to become a single point of failure. Reliable systems must provide for reliable crossover.
C. Detection of failures as they occur. If the two principles above are observed, then a user may never see a failure ā but the maintenance activity must.
3: Wireless security to eliminate any cross control or hacking of RC signal to prevent cheating (this may already exist but I am not aware of it).
A simple way to classify race classes, my thought here is weight classes. If you want to race against a heavier class, you must add ballast. Restricting the electronics to level the playing field will lead to cheating and also retards the development of faster and faster setups. With weight classes, you weigh in at the start and weigh out at the finish and you are done.
In my world, ESK8 racing is just waiting to happen and we all need to up our game to make it a reality.
I did touch on one simple rule and classificationā¦total weight, the great equalizer.