Carbon Topmast for the Radial

I had the chance to ask last year's world women's Radial champ about weight ranges today. She suggested 70kg was good (significantly higher than the average woman although  athletes tend to be heavier than average due to muscle being heavier than fat, don't they?????) but then cautioned that the true weight range is not really known yet. Other worlds reps reckon it varies a lot depending on venue.

all laser are doing is giving choice. all the systems work well, but its down to preference. i prefer the original xd to the new harken system for example. and there are plenty of ppl that sail with the really old 3:1 systems and still win!

and i dont see why we need to change the radial. its a good boat as it is and to bring the average weight down is just making it easier to sail, and isnt the olympics after all desgined to bring out the best sailor??? and whats the point in that if you constantly make the boat easier to sail???

and by the way, not all girls are 5"4!!! im 5"10.5 and i love my radial!!!!

Originally posted by Sarah B One thing I don't understand is why this debate only now it has become an Olympic class and not because it is also a female youth class.

Possibly because the Powers That Be have woken up to the fact that the Radial as it stands was not actually a great choice for the average size of women worldwide, especially in Asia. 

This can do down as lesson 3 on "Why you don't really want your class to become Olympic".

Returning to whether a move to carbon would actually benefit lightweights, apart from bend characteristics, which Chris249 has covered very clearly, simply having a lighter mast will make the boat easier to sail, and more so for lightweights. This is because if the boat heels in a gust (which I suppose happens even to Olympians once in a while), a lighter mast makes it significantly easier to roll the boat flat again.

Originally posted by Bumble Originally posted by Chris 249 Isn't the whole point the fact that "optimum leach tension" varies, according to the sailor's weight? That's the way it's always been in Finns and (inasmuch as there are variations in mast sockets) in Lasers. The concept of tuning mast bend to sailor weight has been around for decades in Finns etc, hasn't it? So So.......... even a finn Europe sailor will tell you the mast can only be bent so much. Consider, the top of the mast is more 'bendy', so its easier to bend to the maximum bent position..... how does this help a lighter weight in the laser. The light weights, are so as I explained, because they are not heavy enough to imerse the boat to a point where their weight is an effective counter. I don't know where your leech (spelling) issue comes from... as I understood it, upwind (when your overpowered) the leech should be parallel to your direction. We all need to point, even small people. so?

I apologise for the spelling error.....btw it's "immerse" not "imerse", and "you're overpowered" not "your overpowered"....

Varying the stiffness of the mast to adjust for weight range in unstayed masts is very common and has done since before the Finn was created (as revealed in an interview by Rickard Sarby). A flexy top section allows the leach to blow open. The upper leach does not always have to be parallel to your direction, that varies enormously from class to class and condition to condition. Lowell North used it as a guide but I've been aboard North team national champs trimmed by North sailmakers who have won a couple of worlds and an America's Cup and they broke the "rule" regularly (with success).

The two Laser sailors in my family are vaguely competent (e.g. in the 20s in Open worlds, championship winners against guys who finished 1st, 3rd, 4th Open and Radial worlds etc) and the upper leech being parallel has never entered into it. The upper leech goes where the tactical and weather situation dictates.

The designers of the Radial rig, Ian Bruce and Hans Fogh, were well aware of the problems of mast bend and its relationship to leech tension and weight ranges as they were Finn sailors and Olympians. The Radial rig was inspired by Ian looking at one of his old Georg Bruder Finn masts, after the failure of the M rig.

If you ask Ian, he will tell you how important leech tension and mast bend are in relation to sail power and sailor weight. The stiffness of the M's topmast was the reason for its failure. It had a shorter (hence stiffer) top section on the standard bottom section, therefore the leach was too tight and the boat was a dog in a breeze.

As he put it, "to depower it (the main on Laser-type rigs) the mast MUST be bent to flatten the sail in order to depower it and the only be done with the mainsheet, or vang, using tension in the leech to pull the tip back. Therefore, the resulting leech tension...determines, very precisely, the narrow weight range of the sailor."

Leech tension is of course determined largely by the stiffness of the mast and angle of the mast step, as well as vang and sheet tension.

"Firstly, the laser is well known to require some weight to imerse some freeboard
and thus increase to moment caused by hiking action.....The light weights, are so as I explained, because they are not heavy enough to imerse the boat to a point where their weight is an effective counter."

The increased immersion of a Laser under extra body weight is very low, and the related increase in stability is minute (as has been confirmed by America's C up/skiff designers).

About the XD kit; apparently Schiedt used the old vang (with one extra block) to win in Athens (can anyone confirm), and secondly it's been proven that among the Masters (who finish pretty well overall) you can beat the world champs with old gear with just two extra pulleys. You can definitely play the old vang gust-by-gust downwind.






Edited by Chris 249

Yes, but the mast is only proposed to shift the average weight down; nothing more. It's not a performance issue.

Rick