Sailjuice Global Warm up handicaps

So what have you got against Phantom sailors ?

......... 

Oh sorry, now I've read it a second time, ProperLy ! .... 

 

but is that because of the handicap, or because you could sit on a chair and have two blokes throw ice cold buckets of water over you very 5 seconds or so and have the same amount of fun?

 

I would guess it is easier for them to adjust 2 or 3 classes than adjust pretty much every other class....

 

Either way the events will be fantastic, I rarely hear too much about event winners from people who travel but I do always hear about the great race they had against someone else from another club in the same class....followed by the chat in the bar/social events afterwards.

 

Only rarely do you get a lot of chat about the winners....and usually for the wrong reasons!

 

Plus (and we have a thead of this) XD kits on Lasers have not made them faster just made them easier to sail (and easier to pull too much on of each control).

Poor old Laser, stuck in 1970's technology with its established PY, while new classes appear in 21st-Century or rather introduce high-tech advances. We need to look at how many old, stuck classes exist, compared to new ones and wag the shorter (easier-) tail.

Totally agree with Jeffers, quote ".... adjust 2 or 3 classes than adjust pretty much every other .... ".

[Yep Jeffers ; shame about no 2012 Phant-Open; Hunts = Nice, Friendly, Accessible place (though sequential marks rather than spatial are a real mystery )

It is unclear to me how the Laser got so far out of step originally but it has been the case for a long time. Once a boat got an RYA PY (especially a Primary PN) it became a sort of self fullfilling prophesy. In the past most clubs have been in the habit of using the RYA numbers because it is the politically easy route withinin the sailing committees keen to show no bias to one fleet or another. So most clubs returns were the existing RYA numbers. Further more until recently returns that showed extreme changes were often discounted as outliers - so the few clubs that were trying to correct the PYs were ignored. (A number of the current SJ adjustments would doubtlessly have been treated thus in the past)

Over the last few years the RYA have been trying to correct the issue by the following changes:

1) they now take more than 60% of the club returns by Sailwave data direct from the clubs so can analyze the race data for themselves.

2) they encourage Clubs to adjust their own handicaps to suit the local conditions / fleets. They provide the spreadsheet and the explanation on how to do this. They also say that they no longer discard extreme returns as outliers.

But we must remember that the RYA PNs are the result of the averaging over a huge number of Clubs, locations, sailors, tidal, non-tidal etc so this slows down the rate of change and also increases the spread of the data.

Additionally  I have heard it reported that the RYA apply an attenuating factor - particularly to primary yardsticks to reduce the rate of change. I believe that this is something like dividing the calculated change by 16 for a primary yardstick. So if the analysis for one years return suggest a change of 32 for a primary yardstick the actual correction applied in the next year is 2.

So you can see why it is a slow process.

In the current round of changes being applied in the Sailjuice Winter Series the exercise has:

1) Attempted to go straight to what is perceived to be the proper handicaps in one step without any attenuation.

2) Only considered the data from large inland waters and hence eliminated the effects of sailing  in tidal conditions, or on narrow rivers or small ponds. This narrows the data spread and makes the handicaps more applicable to the waters where they are being used.

Let's see how it works out...................