The Largest Performance Boating Event in the Western US!

Shortly after the 2024 Desert Storm Sugrue's Shootout it was called to our attention there was a strong possibility of errors in the speeds we reported for the competitors in the shootout, namely they were too fast.

Desert Storm owns four precision radar guns, two of which are state of the art, and these are used in parallel to ensure accuracy and duplicity at the course finish line, and two are used to monitor trap speeds. I reviewed the speeds recorded from both of the finish line guns and found all to be very close between the two guns. Consequently I didn’t think that the guns were in error.  Nor did I expect an error in these expensive devices However, after getting them back to our office I retested the calibration of all four and horrifically discovered that in fact both of these guns were displaying consistent, and identical errors. I might add that our older guns, used for trap speeds were dead on calibration accuracy.

Upon investigation I learned that these guns have a unique ability to correct speeds when the angle of attack is increased from a straight line. This is accomplished by entering a cosine value into the micro processor, and is seldom needed in our application. I was horrified to learn that a large value had become entered into both of these guns with the affect of adding a calculated small amount of speed to the reading to correct, in our case, for a
non existent cosine error.

I owe apologies to anyone affected by this inexcusable mistake on my part in not ensuring that the guns were all calibrated immediately before the runs began on Saturday. You have my pledge that will not happen again, especially as we are striving to build our shootout to a more important level. In fact, we were honored to have current officials from LOTO on both our start boat and finish boat. No one was aware of this program error until Sunday night, unfortunately after the results were posted. In no way was the overall ranking of competitors affected.

Jim Russell
Vice President Operations
Desert Storm 2.0