Composite laser mast released

I happen to know that because of the huge volumes of parts they are buying they get them very cheap. The example I was given was a toe strap, they were paying pennies for them, literally pennies. I can't remember the exact figure but it was something like 64p a unit. They retail for something in the region of £50, without looking. Some people look at that and say "how dare they!?" but most see the complete boat price and think "seems reasonable" and pay out. 

It's all very good poking fun at it but in reality you can't buy it cheaper, so in most cases you're better off just sucking it up and buying it. Most of us are sitting here moaning about stuff like this but working for companies that do at least try and make a profit. That's all they are doing is making a business work and if that means selling a mast for more than we might like to pay for it then good for them, so long as it isn't so expensive that people refuse to. The right price for any given part or boat is as much as you can possibly get away with, from a business point of view. If that means you don't make a profit then it's probably that its a bad product or your sales team need a good kicking, if it makes huge profits then who are we to complain, we bought it!

There are also a lot of fables about Laser kit. My brother was top 25 in the open standard worlds, for example, and he had one old borrowed sail and one new sail in his entire Laser career. We've had people say that Tom Slingsby, for example, would go into the factory and weigh dozens of masts before selecting them. Tom (who I knew as a sub-junior) has told me to my face that's not true, and that he is not allowed in the factory. My former PhD supervisor was the chief scientist at the Australian Institute of Sport and in charge of the study of the bend characteristics of Laser masts, and he says that the study revealed no surprise at all. Stiffness is proportional to spar weight and the differences (in our sticks, anyway) is negligible. Krystal Weir, former world champ and another of our Olympic Laser reps, didn't have that many sails and like Tom or Michael Blackburn (world standard and Radial champ and Olympic medallist), she was not very gear conscious. Both Tom and Krystal have the attitude that it's silly to need special gear when you have to use supplied kit for the major regatta. Learning to adapt to the minor gear differences you may meet is a skill that is needed for success.

The Laser as launched was developed quite a long way from the initial beach boat concept, by the way. At the time there were several vast multi-national conglomerates operating in the beach boat market in the USA, including some of the world's biggest companies. The Laser was developed into a serious but simple racing boat before the product was launched, because the backers did not have the cash to take on car and missile manufacturers in the beachboat market.

The top laser guys don't need to buys new sail every year 'cos, as Chris points out, they get one supplied at every regatta 

I don't think the Laser is a bad boat, but neither is it a great boat. It has a number of shortcomings that make it quite unpleasant for me to sail (I have owned one and sailed several over the years) so I bought something else. It has been demonstrated that when a true one design allows improvements to hull construction and layout (Enterprise and Blaze are the two I have a particular interest in) without reducing weight or changing the hull shape, the new hulls, which may be nicer to sail, are not faster than a well maintained older boat. Laser could make the hulls more durable and introduce a deck layout that was 'shortaRSe friendly (something like a bigger Byte maybe) without making those boats faster than a Standard. They could also introduce a new rig (which probably would make the boat faster but would be a different class in the way that Radial is) which might rejuvenate the boats appeal to younger sailors as well as making it pleasanter to sail. I can't see how that would be bad for the class or the manufacturer, or the sailing public.......