Change the PY System?

You would have to conduct testing in a indoor windsurfing arena.

The 200 boat testing week wasn't meant to be serious, really, and I think you'd need more than that to get close to the accuracy of PY in most cases, as you would also need to change locations and ensure you sailed in all wind strengths, from force 0.1 to force 8.

Originally posted by RS400atC Originally posted by Paramedic I think the reason why the Laser has increased so sharply - having had a readily acknowledged to be lousy handicap for decades - is because there are so many of them out there sailing at all ability levels, all states of decay,  all types of water and in all weather conditions and the new PY calculation system takes that into account. If any class PY should be right its the Laser.  With 200 thousand of the things around its a pretty good bet that we will all sail against a laser once a month if we do any form of handicap racing...... In point of fact, that is untrue. I have sailed about 3 PY races with one or more Lasers in, in the last 5 years. One club I raced at had a separate Laser start. The others split 99% of their races into fast and slow or fast/medium/slow.

Originally posted by Paramedic Originally posted by RS400atC Originally posted by Paramedic I think the reason why the Laser has increased so sharply - having had a readily acknowledged to be lousy handicap for decades - is because there are so many of them out there sailing at all ability levels, all states of decay,  all types of water and in all weather conditions and the new PY calculation system takes that into account. If any class PY should be right its the Laser.  With 200 thousand of the things around its a pretty good bet that we will all sail against a laser once a month if we do any form of handicap racing...... In point of fact, that is untrue. I have sailed about 3 PY races with one or more Lasers in, in the last 5 years. One club I raced at had a separate Laser start. The others split 99% of their races into fast and slow or fast/medium/slow. Theres always one exception  One of the clubs I sail at have a Laser start, but work out the "overalls" from the class results and use this to make a return so whilst you dont race against them you get rated against them. I can only think of one club round here that hasn't got a laser in the dinghy park (South Staffs) so for the most part I stand by my remark :)

You miss my point.
When I was looking around to move house, I looked at a lot of coastal clubs where I might race the 400.
All have their PY fleet split.
On the sea, it seems relatively rare for boats in the 900 to 1000 PY range to be racing against the 1100 to 1300 range.
Maybe it's different in Pondworld, but on the sea there seems to be little data being generated that actually compares the faster boats directly to the Laser or boats of similar speed.
I wonder how this affects the number crunching?

Originally posted by Sam.Spoons It would all come out in the wash if both fleets sailed the same course but, even at my inland club, they sometimes give the Assys a W/L course while everybody else sails round the cans.

I've been thinking about the maths and I'm not sure.
It would be really interesting to be able to prcoess the national data for past years in various ways.
One way that springs to mind is to create a list of 'classes of interest' which would be the boats I race against plus others which are 'similar'.
Then discard all the races that don't contain at least two of those classes.
For some boats that don't fit comfortably into a category, maybe process the data in two categories.
For instance the RS200. Too slow to live in the fast fleet, too different from the Wayfarers etc.
I bet you'd get a different number if you looked at its performance against either the fast group or the medium group instead of munging the data together.

Personally I don't worry about the PY results, which suits a lot of people, but  I do see the argument that if you expect someone to shell out ten grand on a boat to race, some of them will want to take it seriously.