this has been bugging me for a while. i fly almost every day, practice laps are feeling really solid, times are down, i know the lines, and then i show up to an actual race event and its like i forget how to fly. not just nerves i dont think, or maybe it is, but specifically what happens is i start chasing faster guys through sections i normally nail clean and i blow the exit because im not on my own line anymore.

my setup is a 5inch on a F7 stack, running betaflight with pretty aggressive filtering because my motors are a bit worn, rates are mid-range nothing crazy. video quality at the race site was actually worse than what im used to at my practice spot which probably didnt help.

is this just a mental thing i need to work through or is there actual technique stuff people do to stay in their own head during a race. ive heard some guys say they do like a sighting lap thing before heats start but our events dont usually give you that time

100% a real thing and it happens to basically everyone at some point. the chasing problem is really common ? you see a faster pilot go through a section and your brain wants to copy their line in real time but you dont have the muscle memory for their line, only yours. best thing that worked for me was literally just picking a fixed point in every gate and flying to that point regardless of what anyone else is doing. sounds simple but it takes a while to actually do it under pressure.

also if the video is noticably worse at the event site you might wanna play with your vtx channel selection earlier, some venues have a lot of interference depending on how many pilots are on the freq and which channels are adjacent

i had the exact same issue last season. what actually helped me weirdly was watching my own DVR footage from both practice and races back to back. you can literally see where you start deviating from your normal lines and it's usually earlier in the section than you think ? like you're already setting up wrong by the time you're halfway through the previous gate. once i saw it visually it was way easier to catch in the moment. also your worn motors might be messing with your feel more than you realize if the filtering is compensating, might be worth a fresh set just to rule that out