Taking AverageLap Mountain By Strategy

The RYA document on 'Average lap racing';

Originally posted by jeffers If you find yourself in this situation I would request redress as, in my opion, the race has not be conducted fairly and you have been unfairly disavantaged by actions outside of your control.

Been there, done that...I even went to RYA appeal.

Marke, your solution seems very sensible, and a fair way of getting results.

Hi

This discussion is very relevant as I'm in the middle of trying to customise our race management software to be a little more flexible with its average lap timing scheme.

At the moment the system works as JimC described in his SIs - when the leading boat completes the race it then automatically finishes everyone on their next lap.  This works well some of the time but not all of the time.  It doesn't work in the situation where the leading Toppers (slowest boat) have just started another lap and the leading boat (e.g RS800 or B14) finishes the race a few seconds after them.  The leading Toppers are then faced with perhaps another 20 minutes sailing to complete another lap and this prevents the OOD getting on with the next race.

For a variety of reasons it is not desirable to have lots of short laps (congestion in an estuary) - we typically have races of around an hour for the leaders doing 3 or 4 laps.

We really only have a problem with boats slower than an laser as we don't have many boats with PYs between them and the Toppers/Mirrors.

My current thoughts are to provide the OOD with a mechanism to be able to finish the slowest boats on whatever lap he sees fit (i.e. force a finish on current lap), and then just deal with the other boats as for a normal average lap race (i.e. leading boat finish triggers the finish on next lap algorithm).

There is a problem of signalling a shortened course and to get round this we propose to keep the shorten course signal for the leader and use the safety boat to inform the leading Toppers if they are finished early.

Anyone see unforeseen problems with this 'modified' average lap approach, or have a better solution.

thanks

Mark

P.S we do record every lap time on the system  - this allows us the option of 'abandon race at previous lap' if the wind dies which can happen fairly regularly on Wednesday evenings.  OOD signals abandon and the race results are calculated automatically based on the laps completed.


Edited by marke - 26 Jan 11 at 2:43pm

The other way to do it is have a rule that says you can only shorten on the leading boat in any given fleet.