Innovations introduced in the Grand Prix format include simultaneous starts for a small number of gliders, cockpit mounted cameras, telemetry giving the positions of the gliders, tasks consisting of multiple circuits, and simplified scoring.
There is also a limit, 193 centimetres (6 ft 4 in), on the tallest pilots who can safely fit into a typical glider's cockpit.
Yet its fuselage is as slender as a glider's and its single-person cockpit is cramped.
The two pilots, and later the pilot and instructor when the Hotspurs were used as training gliders, sat in tandem in the cockpit.
It's almost like you're sitting in the cockpit on one of these gliders.
While traditional sailplanes have no engines, the self launching glider has a small jet engine mounted behind the cockpit.
A part-time glider and full-time artist, drifting and plunging on the thermal currents above his native Cornwall, Lanyon saw earth and air in constant flux from his cockpit and somehow described the experience on canvas.
