How to Adjust?

So we've had some debate recently on PY with the usual plethora of trolling and banter, but no real benefit to anyone out there looking for a solution.

We have been adjusting at Starcross for about 5 years now - largely as a result of the RYA scheme not keeping up with the development classes back in 2009.  All of our racing is on open water with average lap handicap scoring, but we have a number of class fleets within each of the handicap racing.  Typical turnout is 30-50 boats

We have an annual PN review and do the analysis on our database of recorded elapsed times that our race management software archives automatically.  We have our own PY analysis software which allows us apply the RYA (and Great Lakes) algorithm to different samples from the database (e.g time periods, classes, types of races etc.).  The software also churns out distributions of performance by class (quintiles and deciles).

We focus the analysis on our main racing classes (Merlins, RS200, RS400, Laser, Radial, Hornets) by comparing relative performance at the upper quintiles - this seems to be a pretty good approach and we have very close racing between these fleets (subject to factors such as wind strength, courses, tide - which tend to average out over a series)

Once we do the analysis the data goes to the fleet captains to decide whether to apply adjustments.  The overall policy is not to make a change unless the data is convincing.  We also monitor some metrics about how the classes are distributed in our series and trophy races - and I always re-score last years races with the proposed changes so we can see what the impact would be (As JimC reports the changes are usually very small unless you make very significant changes to the PN).  Since we started making the changes there has been a noticeable increase in the number of different classes appearing top ten.

Some issues:
 - we think the SCHRS system works better for multihulls than the RYA system
 - establishing a PN for a singleton class is hard - but if it is a club member who has sailed other classes at the club to establish their skill level we can have a stab at it where an adjustment appears to be required.  We are very wary of making this type of change without strong evidence.

For the last couple of years the local PNs have been stable and the RYA and Great Lakes numbers have moved to be pretty much in line with our numbers - the one exception being the Laser and Radial where we are close to the Great Lakes numbers but a fair distance away from RYA.  Open water sailing against largely faster classes I think.

We only changed two classes this year - Icon down to 969 from 978, and Wayfarer back to its RYA number.

I think the real benefit for us as a club has been that while new boats with the wrong initial PY will appear, or old boats will get a performance-enhancing makeover now and again, we have our own process by which inequities will be resolved.

Mark


Edited by marke - 24 Oct 14 at 6:18pm

Wow - even given the percentages applied to the suggested PN I'd definitely bring the 2000 not the 300 to L&L.  (If I actually cared about handicap results....)

Marke, sounds like you guys do a fair bit of analysis at starcross, you say you have a few handicap fleets, do you have any all in races?  how would you / do you compensate for the wider spread in handicaps?

Edited by Oli - 25 Oct 14 at 3:44pm

We have about 6 races a year that are all in, including Cruisers. We use the Byron numbers for the cruisers and the PY numbers for the dinghies. As Byron numbers are referenced to some of the better determined PYs of old we dont find too much trouble in using them in an all in race.