Two-Handed Bowling: Autobahn Lane Sheet (Medium Pattern)

Competing on a medium pattern requires versatility. The lane surface, bowling ball preparation and bowling ball selection is necessary to match up your style of play for successful competition. In this Premium Video, Scott Pohl, owner of On Track Pro Shop, overviews Autobahn’s lane sheet and explains what to look for to help make the right ball choice and how you want to approach playing this pattern.

Oil pattern distance

Autobahn’s oil pattern distance is 42 ft. This tells us it’s a medium pattern. Using the Rule of 31 you get a breakpoint roughly around 11 board. This is located at the end of the pattern (42 feet).

Oil volume

Next, we’re going to look at Autobahn’s volume of oil. The oil total is 25.85mL. This is considered average volume. If the total volume of oil is around 27mL’s to 28mL’s it would be a little bit higher volume and would play a little bit earlier than average oil volume. This would require different arsenal preparations.

Track zone ratio

The track zone ratio tells us how the oil is dispersed on the lane from three board to seven board and from 18 to 18 boards. You can see it is 2.44. When you look at the middle part of the lane, you can see it’s much flatter than a house shot.

So, one idea that you can try on this pattern is to start a little bit further right from the rule of 31. Since this track zone ratio gives us a little bit more forgiveness between three and seven board, we’re going to target the breakpoint closer to seven or eight board and see what happens.

Forward oil and reverse oil

Next up, let’s look at the forward oil and reverse oil. Forward oil is 18.7ml and reverse oil is 7.15ml. The forward oil tells you there’s a lot of shape within this pattern. However, reverse oil typically gets the ball to hold in the front-part of the lane a little bit longer. This tells you there’s going to be quite a bit of transition as we go on throughout the block and it could happen pretty fast.
To summarize, Autobahn is a medium distance pattern with medium oil volume that is pretty flat.

Likely straighter angles to start will be the way to go and our plan is to start out attacking around the eight board as our breakpoint with the idea in the back of our mind that the lanes should transition pretty fast.