Nice new Laser for Christmas

Its a shame that the marketing department know nothing about boats, but other than that I can't see what the fuss is about. Laser mast rake is as it comes out of the mould, and boats are built and supplied as they come. It had already been said on here that the chances of a company being allowed to go and weigh boats on mass and select the light ones was pretty much zero, so why is it that now the company have said that they don't, do people start doubting them? Bored on a Monday evening, I suppose.

Maybe I should apply for a job doing their copy writing. I know enough about boats to be able to tell when something is nonsense and I can manage to string a sentence together without too many errors. Maybe I could do the job from home at the end of a laptop, as I don't want to live in Northampton!

I wonder if they've sold any of these Z420s. They are part of the LaserPerformance boat range, produced in the USA for college/uni racing. 

"never ascribe to conspiracy what may satisfactorily explained by incompetence"

Often ascribed to Napoleon Bonaparte (by me amongst others), but nowadays I'm not convinced. Very valid though.

Edited by JimC - 01 Dec 14 at 9:21pm

If people want to see a conspiracy theory they will, and nothing LP or Sailboats can do will stop them. What evidence would convince you? That's a serious question. That there are differences between production Lasers is inevitable. That the differences might be enough to make a difference on the race track is possible, but to the best of my knowledge no-one knows and it might be better not to know.

But the only way you could find out would be to conduct an extensive two boat testing exercise with boats off the production line. It would be a hell of a job. I helped to an exercise like that with Toppers some years ago when they were evaluating centre mainsheets. The results came out that differences caused by the sheeting method were tiny compared to the variations in the sailors and in their individual race performances, however they were *just* statistically significant and the stern main came out faster. Nowadays everyone uses centre mains on Toppers anyway so clearly no-one actually believes science anyway...



Edited by JimC - 01 Dec 14 at 10:08pm

What are you talking about? An on the water boat test is not needed. We are talking about one retailer who is advertising that they have one or more Christmas specials (red hulls) that are lighter and have better mast rake than other Lasers. I expect they also have other Laser hulls in stock.