Ramblings on Dinghy Development

I've probably only raced dinghies for 5 years in total (although interspersed with many years of windsurfing and lead mine sailing), so in terms of experience, knowledge, expertise I would put myself a long way back in the queue of people qualified to comment on dinghy design, but what the hell, here goes.

Like many I succumbed to the mid 90's promise of asymmetric sailing - accessible, fast and cheapish sailing. It kind of worked if you were into circuits, but for club sailing it wasn't so rewarding. When you tired of class circuits you tended to tire of asymmetrics. We've had lots of specific thoughts for that, which I think boil down to one thing - boat polars. Fast asymmetrics are very sensitive to wind angle, particularly downwind where you have a very narrow band where the boat really works. 10 degrees off the ideal and you lose half your boat speed. What I notice about boats that work in club sailing, which tend to be the old classes, is that they are much more even in speed across the wind angles. This works because the reality is that club courses can be all sorts of angles and even if you lay specific shaped courses a wind shift of 20 degrees can change the nature of the course completely. If you sail a boat with a spikey polar this is what gets you in trouble as a course rarely meets the precise angles that your boat works well in.

This only really occurred to me when I considered my own current stead, the Phantom. If you look at the specification numbers I don’t think a Phantom is anywhere near as fast as it actually rates. The reason I think it rates quite fast is because it has a very even polar. This is also why I think it actually makes a good handicap club racer, because it works on pretty much any course.

Contrast this with nearly all recently introduced asymmetrics. Let’s use the latest design singlehander I know of, the RS100. It gives you bucket loads of performance (I’m sure the top speed of an RS100 must be considerably faster than a Phantom), but it’s a very spiky performance across the wind angles and that is what hinders its club racing potential. It's not just the basic performance either, if the performance is not accessible you also have the on-off effect on boat speed.

So for the next generation of performance dinghies we need to solve how to go fast across all wind angles, not just the top speed in a very narrow set of angles. So what innovation do you think has occurred to create a step-change in upwind sailing or DDW? What would you do to even out the polars and make boats work better in club sailing?

More importantly what would we ask for GRF to explore when he gets the time/money for V3?