The vortex concept

Sorry to say this Dave but you must have been sailing it very badly.

The notion that a Vortex (being even half decently sailed) could be as slow as you describe is quite ridiculous. For instance, I'm quite competitive in an RS200 and except in a very light winds I only rarely beat a well sailed Vortex on the water. As soon as it's more than 5 kts they're away.

I also sail a Vortex and can tell you that pre-asymmetric no-one at the front of the fleet sailed angles offwind - as straight downwind virtually always paid. That's a significant part of why the boat needed the asymmetric. If as you indicate, you were trying to sail angles without an asymmetric no wonder you struggled. The only exception was the drifter when an angle was better - but you were doing the opposite. Not suprising as you obviously had no fast Vortex to compare yourself with.

Now of course there's 15m2+ of asymmetric to play with and so it's very quick offwind - even in light winds. For instance, we often come across decent 29ers and they don't always beat the best Vortex in light stuff. They are quicker upwind but the Vortex is slightly faster offwind.

So to summarise, I accept it's not good on handicap in light winds - but it's not as poor as all that - in fact only slightly more so than many other performance trapeze boats

And BTW - when we have sailed with good Sprint 15s, we beat them on the water in the light stuff. Rather like a 'normal' performance dinghy also would - funny that .

My observations were based on the performances of six Vortices, five with asymmetrics - surely they can't all have been unrepresentative?

We're down to one now, plus a couple of occasionals; the others have gone back to ''normal' performance dinghies'.

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really... where?  Let's be honest handicap racing is a procession with lots of excuses whatever you decide to sail; some boats have better excuses than others and I'd agree a vortex is full of them....

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Vareo seems to be "full of them" too. Wasn't there lots of stuff recently about the PYof 1035 being too mean and can we all sail off 1050.........

The vortex appears to struggle in lighter winds because of the amount of drag from the twin hulls - they look like mini barges when they aren't going fast.  When the breeze is up and they are flying kites they do look like fun, but in lighter airs (up to F2) and racing against a handicap fleet they definitely struggle - I can often keep up in an Enterprise.

Maybe they need more sail?!