Laser Arms Race

I'm going to put this in Dinghy Development because quite contrarily to what the 'class racing is best' brigade believe, the truth couldn't be further from their virtual reality of 'we're all sailing the same thing so it must be fair.

Last night once again I presented the finest dinghy ever built to the course area and the wind immediately departed, so we started comparing Laser rigs.

The differences in the various sails were quite remarkable and that's just the class legal varieties, then when you take into account the various 'training' and/or knock offs, the current flavour of the month being from MDM or something similarly named, and you have a complete mess which y'all have the gall to call 'One Design'.

Not to mention the one advantageous thing our lot haven't yet done which is to adopt the new carbon top section that word has it all the top guys are now having to reinforce their sail heads in order to be able to crank so much more downhaul on to have positive effect.

Meanwhile as it gets faster.. the Laser actually gets slower according to it's agenda driven friends in PYAG circles..

Discuss.. Oh and per-lease keep reminding me why class racing is best.

Edited by iGRF - 01 Jun 18 at 7:35pm

The Laser will get slower over time, when new designs of single handers come out Laser PY will have to be altered to allow it to compete, PYAG can't be expected to deal with none class legal sails, that's up to RO.

[QUOTE=Peaky]Even the

From what I'm seeing and hearing, personally and from guys like multiple Masters world champ and top coach Brett Bayer, the change to the big sail has not increased speed overall and there's very little performance difference in the rigs. At class meetings, people who are knowledgeable and trustworthy were saying the development of the carbon topmast was all about reliability and was also performance-neutral.

Edited by Chris 249 - 02 Jun 18 at 12:59am

Well I've noticed huge speed differences in our mackerel fleet as one or the other gets a new/different sail and you can visibly see the differences if you've an eye for these things which trust me after all these years of studying different sails, I have.
One question I didn't quite get the answer to, from one of the class legal guys, apparently there are two types of Laser genuine sails and one has some sort of 'red button' whilst the other doesn't, what's that all about?

And if I were ever serious about sailing that junk I'd have moved mountains to get that carbon top bit regardless of what anyone said about it, carbon is 'live' Alloy is 'dead' and that is a fact of life, unless they've done what they did to the EPS and bung a length of alloy up the middle of a carbon tube to make it look like the real thing but act like something else.

Edited by iGRF - 02 Jun 18 at 1:27pm