1/4 tonners + the cup

Dont get me wrong I have nothing against optimisation of any boat (quaters included) to what the owner interprets as IRC friendly mods. My gripe is that in order to take any quater tonner to a competitve level, (as generally they have either been neglected for years in a shed or turned into a cruiser), it costs a huge amount of cash in order to do so.

But at the end of the day if you can justify spending lots of money on a little old race boat fine...I suppose this is indicative of Keel boat racing in general, Its an expensive sport!

Does any crew who have put a campaign together wish to publish the costs they have spent and then each to their own can judge the costs as to whether it is expensive or not!

That little electric engine was funny, not really made for a boat that size i'm afraid!

Since we have had sgt pepper the rating has gone from 0.869 up to 0.874 and now its back down to 0.869, the boat is also now going faster than ever, so you could say we have optimised well.  The way we did it was make the boat go fast with more sail, and taking the engine out and the new rudder, then tweak things like the forestay position, which we moved to the bow, this allowed us to fit a jib (115% sheeting inside the shrouds) instead of the 150% genoa which was harder to use around a windward leeward course and was wasted sail area in anything over 8 knots. We lost about 2m of sail area from this change which we added to the kite and added a longer spinny pole. Moving area around like this is the best way to optimise a boat without having a new rig, you need new sails every so often so why not change them around a bit, having said that our quantum main has lasted about 4 years now, still looks new but starts to flutter a bit in strong winds, genoas take much more of a battering though, another reason to change to smaller overlap sails!