GB Sailing Challenge - still confused

certainly for spectators at the venue and interested parties away from it this form of tracking is good, it could be better, but modern equipment allows for live broadcast on several channels like fb and youtube and along with mobile phones on ribs doing the video bit a half decent live broadcast could be made of these sorts of events and OD events too, requires a small team dedicated to it and signal.

Originally posted by Mike Holt The SAP tracking at the 505 Worlds has pretty much every detail you need to work out where you were right or wrong, but would be cost prohibitive for most events I would think. https://505worlds2018.sapsailing.com/gwt/Home.html?#/event/:eventId=4d2909ab-d05a-4a94-80b1-dba50bd4729e

Agreed sap tracking is way superior. Good laugh for trying to understand why things happened on the course. Costs as much as a mercenary army I expect.
Makes no attempt to give everyone a prize for some facet of their race in a modern snowflake manner.
Chris 249 is bang on about the ims. Sadly I threw out my early to mid 90s seahorse as part of domestication.
Py is the least imperfect way of going non od dinghy racing, any attempts to hop it up just mystify it. Nobody watches this sh*t anyway it’s a sport for participants. Like angling.
If you dislike py enough to do it at club or open level then you don’t like sailing enough, and I expect don’t do much of any variety anyhow.
Plenty of instances of rating band scrap racing working over 40 pt ranges also, as individual ability usually is a far bigger factor in performance until you get into the top 1 or 2 percentages of the bell curve at national level.

Originally posted by H2 So back to the original post - if we put all the arguments about why handicap racing is so inferior to one side and accept that some people, however strange, will still use it then why not look for new ways to level measure a helms skill rather than the current method. For me I would be interested to see how a data driven approach could work that provided a dynamic handicap based on some variables such as windspeed. If that could be linked to a GPS unit that gave an instant readout of your current position so that you knew moment to moment on your position then that would be an interesting development that I would like to try out to see whether it was in fact an improvement on the current system.

You could just have spotted the hammer/nail interface.....

Edited by Sam.Spoons - 27 Nov 18 at 9:45pm

I don’t disagree that there is some potentially interesting post race analytics that can take place if the right data is collected. It seems very ambitious to use it as the basis for a handicap system.

I suppose you could have a probabilistic handicap system. Rather than a single, deterministic, handicap you have a spread (say Laser 1070-1120) with a probability assigned to each value.