Expensive Sports...

Originally posted by Chris 249   For what it's worth, some of us feel more pressure and angst sailing in mixed fleets!

Originally posted by Sam.Spoons If you class race regularly with the same club/fleet you'll get to know the other sailors pretty quickly. When you first start in a new fleet always give water when asked, do your turns when you get it wrong (even if nobody sees/asks you), don't be a sea lawyer and be generous in your interpretation of the rules. Keeping out of trouble is fast anyway and any close boat on boat action will slow you both down. Finally keep it on the racecourse, if you have a conflict with somebody on the water go and apologise after the finish (sometimes even if you think you were right) then have the rules discussion in the bar later (always a learning process). We play this silly game for fun and, especially at club level, to have a good time with friends.

It's a sport if competition for entertainment is involved (and physical endeavour and skill). The classes of car that race are classed accosting to some kind of formula which may be as simple as engine capacity (sailing analogue, early 18' skiffs "the boat will be 18' long and the race starts at 11 ) or as rigid as a one make series with every component tightly controlled and supplied by a single approved supplier (SMOD). They don't apply handicaps in exactly the same way as we do but weight/ballast systems are not unusual (Touring Cars) and pit time delays to favour less competitive cars/drivers (GT cars) are used. Golfers have a personal handicap to allow inexperienced players to compete with the more expert. Horse racing uses weight equalisation to allow heavier (and that's a bit of a joke in itself) jockeys to compete and extra weight to handicap the faster beasts (my crew has me wiggling the stick to achieve the same effect). 

I'm not so sure I entirely agree, I get what you mean but pretty much all racing cars have 4 wheels and 1 engine (with a varying number of cylinders),  bikes 2 wheels and 1 engine (also with a varying number of cylinders), sometimes with a turbocharger. We have dinghies with one or two hulls (the weta trimarans, sidecar outfits and Morgan 3 wheelers are the exceptions that proves the rule) and one or two sails sometimes with a spinnaker. There aren't exact parallels but it's not really all that different, we just seem to have evolved a method of allowing all these diverse machines to race against each other with a reasonably level playing field (or something). It's a bit like F1 cars racing Micra bangers on the same course (49es and Oppies) but it seem, as you say, to work 

Edited by Sam.Spoons - 26 Sep 16 at 9:38pm

I don't want to spend £10k on a piece of 1960's technology. Equally I don't want to spend £10k on a contemporary design only to find I have no one to play with.   So I buy nothing and the sport suffers.

It seems to me that it is important that we offer sailors choice, but that fragmenting into too many different classes is filled with downsides.

If sailors were less partisan, then we could learn to accept that an MPS and a 700 are, to all intents and purposes, the same class. Likewise the ISO, 4000, Alto and 505 (and possibly the 29er). The Radial, Streaker, Solo, Byte and Europe. Even the Lark and the 200. Amalgamate classes to get bigger, more dynamic, but fewer classes.

Racing a Graduate against a 49er can only ever be a novelty, you will never get a meaningful result with such a mismatch. But a race between one-man hiking boats, or two-man single trapeze boats can be fair and fun. It requires a change of mindset within the racing fraternity to think of Streakers and Solos as the same class – picking the boat is just an extension of choosing whether to use P&B or HD sails with your Winder Mk2 or Ovington hull. To a great extent they can be raced off scratch as their performance profiles and PYs are generally quite similar. You could use PY numbers as a secondary bit of interest. Really this is no different to racing various N12 designs against each other, and allowing those designs known to be substantially slower a bit of leeway.

The RYA have been incredibly laissez-faire about encouraging (not forcing) the more serious racing element into similar boats, leaving the club racing scene entirely to market forces. "A good thing too" you may say. Well, possibly. But even the free-est of free markets are usually regulated in some way. As a sport we have no definitive singlehanded national champion, there is fixture congestion, there is no differentiation between the social pastime racing and 'elbows out' industry-backed racing and it takes years of inside knowledge to know which clubs/classes/events fit best with your personal priorities.