Classic Boat PY's

I think that one of the reasons why there is such a veriety of boats in the UK that are regularly raced agaist oneanother is because the PY system works well. Considering the difficulties that they have to cope with.

A complex problem. I sail a Firefly, which while the sails aren't in the first flush of youth, are pretty good, and she has a fixed mast. Other Fireflies have Ratsey sails and Reynolds masts. And fireflies are relatively easy to deal with compared to the development classes. We adjust handicaps to, we hope, give sailors of equal ability the chance of winning, whether the boat is a racing machine that happens to be old, or a boat kept as original. There is alot of debate among those who care about such things in the fleet concerning what modifications to make. Most of the fleet are just happy to be given a number, and feel the real race is on the water, whether it be a well sailed merlin keeping up with a Jollyboat, or 2 Pegasus' battling it out.

Surely this is what is supposed to happen though? the plus for one design racing being that 2 well maintained boats should react the same in any given condition dependant upon the skill of the crew in reacting to those conditions.

If we accept that the (identical) boats will react in pretty much an identical manner than crew skill becomes the determining factor.

In handicap racing a laser will react quicker to a wind shift than will a GP14 with a spinnaker up. In one design racing a GP sailing in so little wind it can't use it's spinnaker will not be handicapped relevant to other GPs sailing that also can't use their spinnaker - it will suffer though in handicap racing when compared to a boat that doesn't have one and which isn't being handicapped by not being able to use it.

But then again no one ever claimed handicap racing was accurate or fair :-)

ciao

Ian

There are several problems with the portsmouth system - the biggest is that the handicap is based on club returns to the RYA.  This means the following:

1. The allocated number is based on the average sailor sailing the average condition boat at the clubs that have the time and resources to make a return.

2. The system doesn't adjust for the distribution of this data or provide any correction for the variance.  This means that development classes, which would have a skewed distribution are treated the same as a strict one-design that might have a very narrow typical normal distribution.

3.  There are probably not enough data for a lot of classes to be statistically significant and therefore any corrections are suspect.

All this is before considering differences between venue, wind strength etc.

There might be a solution that would improve things, certainly worth investigating.

1. All affiliated clubs must make a return

2. Special events (like the bloody Mary etc) where it is known that the top sailors in each class will be competing in a handicap race make a special return that has a higher weighting in the returns analysis.

3. All open meetings and nationals and club class races provide a return of position and age (this would allow correction for skew in the return for that class).

4. Every 5 years the RYA conduct trials using say the top 5 sailors in the main classes to collect on-the-water data. By focusing on the best sailors the problem of average class ability also being reflected in the handicap is eliminated.

This would be complicated and resource intensive for the RYA, but once set up would give better data to compile the handicaps from. Thus allowing different numbers for age / venue / ability to be compiled from the raw data.  It would still be imperfect and based on averages but hopefully fairer than the current system.