Worst of all are those who sit back and complain from a distance, never actually bothering to get out and take part.  Change should come from within Graeme, so get out and do some of the races, actually see what happens, talk to the organisers in person, get your points made that way, then maybe people that matter will take notice.

BUT

On this one Nessa is dead on the money. 

Really it is not an establishment conspiracy, or vested interests or the CIA or MI5. It is just the best compromise to let everyone have some sort of crack.

At Club level anyway. The funny thing is though, given enough time from what I've seen the best people always come out on top wether they are using their pimped to the gunwales racing special or borrowing the club hack of a GP14.

As to no case for it, since it's never been tried before, that's a pretty dogmatic position to take.

One where, like IMS in it's early iterations, meant that the RC decided who won, results took an age to calculate, and you never knew how you were doing on the racecourse? One that resulted in the event being termed the "comedy cup"? To the extent that they gave up on the tide adjusted, wind adjusted scoring system. Of course, TOT takes the conditions into some degree of account anyway. 

Or has nobody mentioned the difficulty of trying to build a VPP for planing  boats (whatever planing is...)

Measurement handicap or rating systems and dinghies don't mix. 

What garbage. The Fireball is one of the best rough weather dinghies ever made. I don't think I have ever seen one go down the mine. 

 

That's absolutely the case, and similarly a well sailed Lightning or Solo would destroy Scheidt or Slingsby in light airs on the tiny pond.

 

I wonder when either of them last sailed in a handicap race......

 

 

That's not a particularly helpful analogy. In case you hadn't noticed all the 'Arab Springs', Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Syria, etc., failed dismally with the old 'deep state' regimes firmly entrenched. Additionally all the real dictatorships of the Gulf states have consolidated their positions of strength.

 

In any case, handicap racing isn't important enough in the grand scheme to warrant major change to the current system.

1) change the management in the club.  Get involved, submit results to the RYA, adjust numbers where needed.

2) change your club to one that does the above (we probably need less clubs anyway)

3) choose class racing only

VPP style handicap… I've no doubt it could be done, I've also no doubt that the change would generally be disastrous given the conservative nature of the sport.  And finally, I've also no doubt that it will still prove utterly unsatisfying for some with all sorts of accusations of banditry and building boats to 'cheat the system'.  

Warning; NSFW (Now Showing Fearsome Waceboats).

Yes, that is a "ski jump" transom on Siemens, a Frers IMS boat. It may have had a wooden keel, too.

I have also been told by designers that the use of a VPP effectively kills amateur designs. It becomes quite hard to predict how changes to the design will effect the rating. One ends up with an arms race where one has to have a better (ie more expensive) VPP than the VPP used by the rule.

And of course it's not as simple as working out how fast a boat will go in a particular breeze; acceleration, surfing, motion through chop etc all count a lot towards performance.

A lot of VPPs would show little difference between a 1973 Phantom and a 2013 one, but there is a big difference in speed (according to this forum) even if the old boat is immaculate. And you could end up encouraging rather regressive designs such as hull bumps or sheerlines designed to make the boat appear narrower at deck level and therefore slower.

There's just no way to design the perfect system. Like those who demand the perfect boat, the search for perfection could actually be harming the sport a lot more than it assists it.

Is Graeme thinking about a "true VPP" rating system, like (IMS)ORCi/ORR (complicated and inaccurate, according to Jason Ker), or a rating algorithm system - like IOR,International Rule, IRC (assumed, as it's secret) etc.

Not really sure how either of those could deal with dinghies, where such a significant proportion of total displacement comes in mobile, carbon based form. 

Saying the same thing, IMHO. Main difficulty, AISI, is that the understanding of the basic sweet spot in terms of speed producing factors - length, beam, displacement, sail area is found relatively quickly. If you make a boat that's all around faster than the rule thinks it is, you've just got one iteration further down that road. But in a modern world where the designers' VPPs are much more sophisticated than the rule writers', that's actually a road that gets travelled pretty quickly. (The other option is a one-trick pony.)

So then you're left with the other stuff that the relevant rule measures, - the boat slowing stuff. And trying to get a handle on that, and working out what doesn't slow you down quite as much as the rule is where you can get a jump on your competitors. 

Not necessarily the case for IRC. 

2 FUNDAMENTAL POLICY . . 2.2 The IRC concept protects the existing IRC fleet. 2.3 IRC encourages design innovation consistent with stability, rounded performance, seaworthiness and safety. 2.4 IRC discourages unnecessary expense at all levels. 2.5 The spirit of IRC requires that owners and designers shall not seek means of artificially reducing the rating of a boat, e.g. increasing performance without a corresponding increase in rating. . . . 2.8 Any exploitation of the inherent simplicity of the IRC Rule will be discouraged. The RORC Rating Office and UNCL therefore reserve the right to make adjustments or amendments to any part of IRC at any time in order to prevent undesirable or unforeseen lines of development.

I think what Jim has sort of touched on is the fact that it is easier to sail a slow boat above its rating more of the time than it is a fast boat. Not anything to do with designing a faster boat. Purely and simply if you wipe out in a tp52 it is probably going to take longer to recover than if you wipe out on a 30 foot cruiser. Also, even if you take the same time to get it back on it's feet as the blokes in the 30 footer it will still cost you more time against your rating percentage wise. Therefore it is easier to sail a small, slow, boat to it's rating than it is a fast tippy one where you are likely to be losing time at every corner and probably on every wave compared to the "perfect" race.

On that point, perhaps it is impossible to sail a boat above it's rating, more, sail it closer to its rating than every other boat in the fleet more of the time!? 

VPP for dinghies will not work, at least not in the way that GRF wants it to. There are simply too many variables. That's before you even begin to consider sailor skill! Factoring that in would be ultimately pointless anyway because if it actually worked everyone would finish at exactly the same time in every race, if they didn't then there would be a problem with the system which would cause outrage! 

I think what Jim has sort of touched on is the fact that it is easier to sail a slow boat above its rating more of the time than it is a fast boat.

Unfortunately given the current level of development expecting a VPP based dinghy handicapping system to be superior to the PY system is probably expecting too much. Never say never though.

You cannae change the laws of physics.

The one thing they have done is resulted in a better prediction of performance.