Nature or nurture

Comparing dinghies and leadmines is interesting too.

Originally posted by KazRob A recent post by the normally controversial iGRF praising the Phantom has had me thinking. How much of a boat's appeal (when it is actually sailed) is down to the genius of the designer and how much is down to tweaks, modernisation and developments over the years. I'm firmly in the camp that thinks that development and tweaks over the years can make a good basic boat design boat great to sail. If the Phantom had been a SMOD would it still have appeal today? Or indeed are we seeing boats like the RS400, which was once thought of as a 'modern' Merlin, being slowly made to look old fashioned by the new Merlins with raking carbon rigs? Of course I'm not really opening the discussion of whether restricted classes are better than SMODs but more whether the middle ground of slowly tweaked one designs makes the boats better in the long run (and should the SMODs move that way in time)

The thing about the Phantom and the Finn is that they have a clear niche. Big blokes.

The 400 was part of two movements. Firstly Asy's for the masses. Secondly a kick-back against high costs of new dinghies in some classes at the time, as everything was getting too bespoke and not only expensive, but you had to make a whole load of choices about what kind of rig you wanted or even hull shape on the most high profile classes. Merlins of that era were getting raking rigs, but not one-string, so were not the easiest thing to sail well. So an OD with less choices must have appealed to a lot of people.

It also hits a few compromise 'sweet spots'. It's just fast enough for the apparent wind sailing game to work, but slow enough to suit enough venues and to cope with round the cans reasonably.
It's not hugely weight sensitive. Heavier gives you more power, but offset by more drag from the transom.

The continued success of the 400 is probably partly due to there being no obvious rival?

Slowly tweaking OD rules is a difficult art. The most important thing in class racing is to have other boats that give you a good race. Critical mass is everything.
But being a small class does not mean that class is not a success. If you get tight racing in a local fleet or two, or even a hotly contested 15 boat nationals, those people might well be getting better sport than the also-rans in the more popular fleets.It's easy to ruin that by selling a dozen new boats that are faster.

Probably timing has something to do with it. Are the key people in the fleet well placed to upgrade to a new boat? Are there enough improvers/club sailors looking to buy their old boats?

Originally posted by JimC On the other hand if a boat is fundamentally rubbish, who's going to put the effort in?

You can win club races with just mainsheet and kicker on a Phantom. Next most important strings are forestay and outhaul. I've never use more than that even in Open meetings.