% penalty for winning races

I've got a lot of sympathy for Alex with this idea, anything which encourages new sailors to get stuck in has got to be a good idea.  Think of it from a newbies point of view, fancy sailing, do course, spend probably £1500 on a boat, get shouted at on start line, finish last, last in to changing rooms, bar etc, gives up..

Something like this gives a tangible feeling of progress as they see their handicap altering.  We run very successful Personal HGandicap prizes at major club events, on occassion the event winner picks up the ph prize if they've excelled themselves, and  mid and back end fleet are happy to pick it up if they've sailed well.

If club legend gets upset then I suspect that they either don't care about newbies taking part or are happy being the biggest fish in a small pond. 

If you don't encourage your new intake then after natural attrition you'll end up with no one sailing..  just my 2 p's worth

Exactly.

Why should I bother to give any thought to my boat or my sailing when the effect will be dialled out in the final results. Best just turn up and see what happens, maybe sail badly when it doesn't matter to help when it does matter, maybe give up and do a sport where I'll get rewarded to investing time and effort.

As others have said: Keep it for just one of your series, so you can encourage a different set of people into the sailing and racing. We use Sunday racing for the out and out winner takes all, and the Wednesday Evening is run as a personal handicap pursuit race. Typically we get 50-60 boats on a Sunday, and 60-70 on a Wednesday evening. (Want to join us? Burghfield at J12 on the M4).

The details and calculations involved in the personal handicap are all published on the web site and everyone knows in advance how far they have moved the last week: There is of course a prize for the highest personal handicap, to provide something for the experts.

Over the last 3 or 4 years, with 18 races on Wednesday each year, we have had only one person win 2 races in one year - so it does seem to allow the winning of races to be shared. Do the club champs still race? Certainly over the last 2 or 3 years the prize for highest handicap has been fought over by 2 different National Champions: yet beginners can be out in the same race competing against them.

We use a scheme where the top 1/2 of boats get a varying number of seconds added to their start time (start later), while the lower half get seconds removed from their start time. All differences are cumulative and are based on seconds difference: but you actually start at a rounded 30 second start time.

Cheers, Chris