Grafham Grand Prix

Ah the old shortening when the wind goes walkabout trick!  Makes you delighted to race handicap if you are in a slower boat and have to drift home in no wind...  That may explain the MR results if the wind died for the slower boats as I think they were one of the fastest classes in the handicap division. 

Originally posted by Hector But come on Jim, are you really suggesting that it's that much higher than the 200s / Flying 15s etc?

In general, or the particular selection of sailors from those fleets on that day on those courses in those conditions?

From time to time classes seem to get in the habit of organising very strong entries for major handicap events. The Merlins are doing it at the moment. The Cherubs used to do it in the late 80s and early 90s and won all sorts of stuff, but I think its quite a few years now since they won anything, even though the current PY is very favourable for a state of the art boat.

Funnily enough, if I were naive enough to look at just the results from my club this sunnmer, the one boat that appeared to have a complete gift handicap was the RS200. One very good pair of sailors ran away with our summer series, when two other hot crews jumped into one they led the fleet, and even the boat with a novice crew was well up with top 3 places a lot of the time. However I like to think I'm not that naive: our puddle suits the 200 much better than say Grafham, which being bigger is probably better for faster boats, and the start sequence this summer put the RS200s in clear air for virtually all the evening.

Clearly a very hot Merlin contingent was also well suited by the conditions. But you also need to remember that the difference between front and back in most classes is around 200 points of yardstick... Handicap really makes much less difference than most people think.

The thing that is really worth doing before you complain about handicaps is to rework the results with different numbers. You would be amazed at how much difference in handicap it takes to change things much - often 50 or 100 points! Are the times posted on Grafham's website (its blocked here?). Download a copy of sailwave, have a play, and tell us what you think the numbers should be...

Just as an example of how things are, the i14 would still have won the first race at the Grand Prix in the fast fleet with a PY of 675 (faster than a Tornado!!) but then that handicap would put them 23rd in the second race... You really can't learn anything from small amounts of data...

Edited by JimC

If you rework the results and give the 14 a PY of 675 then the leading 14s average lap time in race 1 is 1444 secs and the 49ers av lap time is 1453. However to make the same difference between first and second in race 2, you have to give the 14 a PY of 870, whereupon it corrects out at average lap of 1562 secs, and the leading b14 at 1686.

675 is a number I calculated to make a point. It is NOT NOT NOT a suggestion as to the correct PY for the 14! Its a very instructive exercise to take a bunch of race times, put them in a spreadsheet, and calculate a personal PY on each boat that gves them all the same corrected time.

PM sent to scooby with a link to a spreadsheet. I don't want to make it public right now.

Edited by JimC

Originally posted by JimC If you rework the results and give the 14 a PY of 675 then the leading 14s average lap time in race 1 is 1444 secs and the 49ers av lap time is 1453. However to make the same difference between first and second in race 2, you have to give the 14 a PY of 870, whereupon it corrects out at average lap of 1562 secs, and the leading b14 at 1686. 675 is a number I calculated to make a point. It is NOT NOT NOT a suggestion as to the correct PY for the 14! Its a very instructive exercise to take a bunch of race times, put them in a spreadsheet, and calculate a personal PY on each boat that gves them all the same corrected time. I'll post a spreadsheet in a while...

I know what you are saying every year our club does a personal handicap day and it is very interesting to see the handicaps people are given

Originally posted by giraffe what is the reason for using average lap time.  Why not fastest lap time?  it is a race after all

Average lap times as used here is a way of minimising the variations in the weather by having all boats racing for about the same length of time, counting the number of laps they do, and averaging out a time per lap, rather than have all boats sail the same number of laps, and the faster boats hanging around for ages waiting for the slow ones to finish, quite possibly in more wind or less. If you used fastest lap then the lap I spent twenty minutes uspide down on wouldn't harm my race position - hey, this sounds like a good idea for *me*!!



Edited by JimC