Personal Handicap

At Wilsonian we use personal handicaps for pursuit races, because they can make the racing and finishes much tighter than they would otherwise be (once you're passed by a faster boat in a pursuit, you can see all too clearly that you're not going to win).

The handicaps were initially guessed at by looking at the finishing order of boats in normal series, and allotting personal corrections accordingly, assuming there is a 10% difference between the fastest and slowest sailor; with hindsight, I'd make that 20% difference, incredible as it sounds. Thereafter, the results of pursuit races are fed back into the system to tweak the personal handicaps by rough and ready rule of thumb/calculation.

We don't use personal handicaps for normal massed start racing because they don't make the racing any better on the water, and lead to a set of results that everyone regards as even more arbitrary than the official PY's. There's not much incentive to improve if the only consequence will be a stiffer handicap, and people might sandbag prior to important events, making the whole thing a pantomime.

The real answer is for slow sailors to learn and improve if they want to win, but in practice few bother to even get a book out of the library...

Two completly different sports and impossible to compair, each class of dinghy is completely different, where as in golf there limition in kit is much smaller, secondly there are thousands of golf handicap bandits out there, i wouldnt want to encourage this in sailing.

when we lived in aus the approach to this was really simple.

races lasted approx 90 mins to an hour.

it was one design racing

handicaps ranged from 0 mins (adjust your elapsed time by 0) to 20 mins (adjust by 20 mins)

after each weekend the handicap result was calculated.

winner had 3 mins deducted, 2nd had 2 mins deducted, 3rd had 1 minute deducted.  if the scratch boat won then everyone was given 3 minutes.

it was an excellent way of sharing out the prizes and was a real challenge for the leading boats to see how far they could win by.

should be done here.

The issue for classes is that an adjustment of over 30 points is not going to make a difference, (this is known not to be a skill issue) apart from annoying some members of the problem fleets who are the mid level sailors. These guys have spent a lot of money to get an appropriate boat for themselves and the water, and the differential even within the class has been caculated at over 60 points on the PY scale. Most of these guys came in the top half of their nationals fleet last year.

So where some of the fleet are happy to accept a 30 point change, this in fact will make no difference. We are not intending to change all of the handicap racing to personal handicap, as we are aware of the difficulties as mentioned above.

What we are trying to do is make some of the handicap racing more competative for everyone, and therefore boost attendances, as there is a sometimes a general why bother feeling when it comes to the handicap series.

The suggestion of personal handicapping has come from some members of that fleet, as they also see the problem.

What w want to know, before we put a suggestion forward to our racing committee, is how this is run elsewhere, as the idea is to give everyone a chance to win, including the Phantoms.