John, my advice would be to keep everything in OD spec. Buy as many sails as you can on the cheap now before they disappear for good. New sails are going to be the killer for any low budget boat.
Keep it all as it was, it was possible to sail a Farr 45 to an IRC rating, it takes good crew work because they are relatively unforgiving compared to more cruisy alternatives.
As a general rule for IRC if you do want to optimise, upwind sail area is expensive, reducing this will bring your rating down considerably. Spinnaker area is cheap, so keep as much as you dare.
IRC is actually relatively good these days so long as it is rating boats with similar performance curves. That's one of the issues with the system. Clubs want boats in the same fleet to be finishing at the same time for obvious reasons. Really for the best racing the boats should be grouped by DLR, SA/D or some concoction of the two. The issue then is that you would have boats finishing at different times. Not such an issue offshore or on distance races, but when you try and pack 3 or 4 races into a day inshore its much harder to manage.
On the other hand, one theory for why IRC appears to favour heavy boats is that it actually favours long boats. Your relatively light 45 footer will have to race against relatively heavy 50+ footers. The theory goes that IRC doesn't account very well for the advantage of length in waves. A 25 footer pitching and rolling upwind in relatively small waves will have a disadvantage against your 45 footer which probably spans these waves and will not pitch around nearly as much. By bringing your sail area down you then begin to race against more similarly sized boats so do not take this disadvantage.
There are lots of theories and there is also a lot of development going in to the rating rules. Another reason not to go chasing that magic rating. Sail the boat as it was designed, the Farr45 is a brilliant boat to sail so risking changing that for a magical rating number is probably a bit of a mistake.
The Farr 45 is not an intrinsically fragile boat. They are quite old so they've clearly lasted well, therefore not fragile. Unfortunately they are heavily loaded boats so things can break rather spectacularly, even if it is just a snapped jib sheet or halyard. The problem for boats this age which have now depreciated is that the owner paying current prices still has to pay the same price for his new sails and new jib sheets etc as the owner who's just bought a Fast 40+ for 10x the price. It's the same reason not many people buy old Jaguars as a cheap runabout, you can pick them up scarily cheap, but the tyres and parts are still very expensive.
For that reason, keep it simple, keep it OD, for the price of a new set of sails you could probably pick up a second boat to join your fleet and have someone to race against.
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