Spy photos

Originally posted by Guest#260 They slammed the innovation with a bad rating so the French refused to race it...

I don't think anyone actually made a case for it being a bad rating. The mast was designed to run a coach and horses through the measurement rules by being draggy, but not as desperately draggy as it looked on paper. So the measurer looked at the rule book and the book said that it was his job to give the rig a fair rating rather than stick to the letter of the measurement rule. So that's what he did, and toys were thrown out of the pram.

It was an example of a problem that often seems to hit yacht handicap rules. There's a tension between allowing innovatiuon and giving a fair rating to all boats. If the rule aims to give every boat a fair handicap then it should immediately deal with innovations that creep round the rule.

This is in contrast with box rules, where there's no question of a fair rating - if you can design a faster boat within the box then good luck.

And of course the other issue is that too often in such rules innovations were like that mast - slow, but not as desperately slow as the measurement system thinks it is. Its not really a great way of improving the breed!

Originally posted by JimC Originally posted by Guest#260 They slammed the innovation with a bad rating so the French refused to race it... And of course the other issue is that too often in such rules innovations were like that mast - slow, but not as desperately slow as the measurement system thinks it is. Its not really a great way of improving the breed!

I thought it was super-quick.

I saw Krazy K-yote and her mast close up and it was truly a thing of great beauty in my opinion.

http://www.rorc.org/admiralscup/history/1999/photos/krazykyo te2/default.html

Hubba Hubba

That is a bit nice

Originally posted by Bruce Starbuck The rig didn't rotate but they wound a bunch of twist into the mast upwind with the windward runner.

Exactly so. That was the game. Their idea was that they'd get a rating for a huge thick oversize non rotating mast, and twist it so that the performance was midway between that and a rotating section. They then got given, just as the rule said, a rating that reflected how they actually used the thing, and they threw their toys out of the pram and stopped sailing. They actual value of the thing other than as a rule evasion is nicely demonstrated by the number of others that have been built - ie none.