Ovington Laser

I imagine the helm balance was also a major factor. 

It would be very fascinating to know if as rake tolerance was included in the original build manual, if it was added and then if it was changed over time. 

Interesting when they did the last Olympic single handed equipment trial they didn’t like the D-zero because, and I paraphrase, ‘being able to adjust the mast rake makes the boat more technical to sail and distracts from the athleticism required by the sailor’

One problem with the alloy masts is they were extruded and the extrusion dies wear over time so wall thickness will vary over time so that can have a big effect on stiffness. Even a +/-5% on wall thickness will give a big change in section stiffness.

Conversely, I know from boats like the OK and Finn where mast bend is critical that the carbon mast manufacturers now do really repeatable bend numbers (+/- a few mm).

In my time laser sailing, I had top sections weighing between 2.6 and 3.1kgs. Thats the range of the 10 or 15 topmasts I had so the true population will be a bit broader. Thats all in the wall thickness - if you do the sums on inertia, that is a big, big difference which transcends going from a bendy to stiff mast in, say a Solo. So the extrusion tolerances are massive. I heard for the Atlanta games in 1996 the organisers bough 500 sets of spars and cherry picked the 500 closest of each spar to the mean.

My knowledeg of composites is that tensile performance of fibre can vary a bit within batches, but will probably even over a spar. Resn fraction can be controlled very precisely in almost all methods even wet lay, so I think that the 2.6 to 3.1kg range will be very, very easy to improve on in composite.