Racing quality
Printed From: Yachts and Yachting Online
Category: Dinghy classes
Forum Name: Dinghy development
Forum Discription: The latest moves in the dinghy market
URL: http://www.yachtsandyachting.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=11366
Printed Date: 14 Jul 25 at 1:08am
Software Version: Web Wiz Forums 9.665y - http://www.webwizforums.com
Topic: Racing quality
Posted By: iGRF
Subject: Racing quality
Date Posted: 28 Feb 14 at 7:47pm
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So, my impression here at the coast they are royally screwing things with their relentless attack on boats like the Phantom, inland bias towards their data sample.
How are you doing? ------------- https://www.corekite.co.uk/snow-accessories-11-c.asp" rel="nofollow - Snow Equipment Deals https://www.corekite.co.uk" rel="nofollow - New Core Kite website |
Replies:
Posted By: iGRF
Date Posted: 28 Feb 14 at 7:50pm
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And do us a favour you sanctimonious 'class racers' don't vote and bugger off eh? There's good chaps nothing you say do we want to listen to.. ------------- https://www.corekite.co.uk/snow-accessories-11-c.asp" rel="nofollow - Snow Equipment Deals https://www.corekite.co.uk" rel="nofollow - New Core Kite website |
Posted By: craiggo
Date Posted: 28 Feb 14 at 8:00pm
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Graeme,
I may be wrong, but it seems that you have still not grasped how to use the PY system. You do not have to use it as a bible. It is merely the RYAs best view, based on statistical real race data of what a PY for each boat should be. If your own club uses the system then it will have the ability to make an adjustment to each boat sailed there to try and locally level the playing field. I accept that where you only have the odd one or two boats of a class, this then becomes a bit of a personal system, but if you adjust to say 50% of the difference and see how it goes, you can then start to see how it goes. The vagueries of boat design and conditions mean your holy grail vpp will never materialise and any idea of a measurement system will quickly end up with people identifying the key factors for optimisation such that within a very quick time period only one type of boat will dominate and everyone else will walk away once they have emptied their chequebook. Attempts to close loopholes will end up with the handicap administrators being accused of favouritism by those who thought they'd successfully blown a hole through the rules and we'll end up in an even bigger mess. I sail on a coast, with extremely different conditions to yours, we have the worlds second highest tidal rise and fall and some pretty mean short sharp chop, and the system broadly works for us just as it does for many inland clubs. There are a great deal of coastal clubs using PYS and Id be fairly comfortable saying it probably works for them to. I admit I like the idea of having a centralised set of numbers that work everywhere, but if someone at my club gripes about their number and I see on our PYS page that its way out of line with the national figures then we'll look to adjust it. I think thats fair. |
Posted By: yellowwelly
Date Posted: 01 Mar 14 at 12:03am
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Don't ask us Graeme if our racing has improved by handicap racing, ask all the folks who used to race dinghies but now find other ways to spend their Saturday and Sunday. ------------- |
Posted By: ChrisI
Date Posted: 01 Mar 14 at 12:05am
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Graeme,
Craiggo is right. Measurement based systems that produce a "one number" handicap are generally type-forming, and can be "gamed" (or as Craiggo puts it "key factors for optimisation can be identified") so that designers end up designing what the rule makers want, not necessarily what us sailors may want, and this is why from time to time they implode when the formula is wrong or out of date, while those systems that produce a 'multi-number' handicap based on different variables (type of course, wind strength that day etc) end up being so complex that people don't understand it/get bored waiting for the results to be computed. The current PY system strikes a balance - being a simple one number system that is not type-forming and cannot be gamed, but which allows for, and in fact expects, a certain amount of variability for different types of water. To spell it out verbatim from the PY website: "However, the national list is based on a summation of recommendations from clubs nationwide. The list of national numbers may not be appropriate for every club individually. This is due to a number of factors including the type of boats sailed at each club, the predominant wind trends, tidal factors, size of water etc. Because the national list will not suit every club, each individual club should develop its own list of handicap numbers from their race results". Here's a suggestion.... if you think sea-based clubs are getting a short straw (and you may be correct that a majority of returns come from inland clubs) then do exactly what the Sail-Juice guys have done with their handicaps. Have a chat with your sea-based club, persuade them to link up with similar others on the sea to share data, and then agree together and use any adjustments to PYs you think appropriate. (Maybe even call the PY adjustment GRFY....  )
PS Craiggo.... with that tidal range I think you must sail at the very same club as my mate Jeremy, who I sailed across the channel with in his Laser 2k? How's his, er, long distance Wayfarer coming on?!! |
Posted By: craiggo
Date Posted: 01 Mar 14 at 8:18pm
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Chris, I do sail at the same club as Jeremy. I used to be his Int 14 crew so I have probably meet you a few times. His round UK Wayfarer is coming on well. Thwart has been ripped out and replaced with a carbon strut so that Jeremy and Phil can sleep underneath it. They now have an old Grad jib of mine to use as a heavy air jib.
Paul |
Posted By: iGRF
Date Posted: 01 Mar 14 at 8:45pm
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Well you're wrong, and like a lot of dinghy folk, no judge of human nature.
There needs to be an alternative, and controlled by the supply side of the Industry, you can't expect them to take the risks they have to, to gear up for boat production only to have a bunch of muppet consumers destroy their market through incompetence. What's happened to the Icon is ridiculous and a travesty and there are many other stupid illogical things happening due to the randomness and bias of the reporting system. It is out dated, out moded and should be superseded by something better that cannot be allowed to change unless there is some physical alteration in the build specification of the craft. ------------- https://www.corekite.co.uk/snow-accessories-11-c.asp" rel="nofollow - Snow Equipment Deals https://www.corekite.co.uk" rel="nofollow - New Core Kite website |
Posted By: Presuming Ed
Date Posted: 02 Mar 14 at 12:21pm
| In measurement rating rules, freezing of the rule is a leading indicator of rule death. |
Posted By: NickM
Date Posted: 02 Mar 14 at 9:40pm
| Graeme, as Commodore at Hythe, why don't you persuade your Sailing Committee to come up with locally suitable variations of the PY scheme as other clubs do? |
Posted By: Chris 249
Date Posted: 03 Mar 14 at 2:46am
So you want the supply side of the industry to be able to dictate a PY or rating, and you assume that they won't be tempted to dictate one that will make all their new boats unbeatable? If the industry want to gear up for boat production and have surety they can do what the cat guys did with the Formula 18 and create a class structure that has more chance of creating critical mass, or actually working within the current rulesets. Far from being unfriendly to new designs, our sport is extremely welcoming to them. Road cycling doesn't even allow any new designs now, unless they have received UCI pre-approval. It's the same with golf and skiing. Sailing appears to be extremely unusual when it allows anyone to come up with a new product and throw it into major events. I know that you will say that you are better and smarter than those who run the major sports and sailing, and that they are doing the wrong thing. Maybe you should stop worshipping your own brilliance and accept that there are many, many people out there who are (and this may come at a shock to you) as smart as you or smarter. Many of them have tried for many years to create this perfect rating rule that you think is so easy to create. As you have been told many times, none of them have succeeded, because it's an incredibly difficult problem that even people who design America's Cup boats (where huge amounts have been spent on VPPs and testing) believe can never be solved in our time frame. If you bothered to actually respect people enough to learn what they have tried in the past, you would see that your ideas have been tried in sailing and that they have failed. For example, the idea that there is any accurate VPP that can work better than PY by using crude categorisations of hull types (as you have proposed) is a non starter. There is no simple way of categorising hull shapes as things in sailing form a continuum. The IRC does something vaguely similar - but the rub is that it still causes a huge amount of complaints, many of which may be as baseless as many of the complaints about PY. |
Posted By: iGRF
Date Posted: 03 Mar 14 at 8:09am
I will endeavour to get them to form a "sailing committee" to review this latest debacle, but since it's taken us windsurfers this long to teach them how to race properly, I can't see them having the political will to over rule centuries of RYA domination, they are just not aware. I had a conversation on Sunday with the Commodore from the club that is a bit more switched on at the Redoubt where they do adjust handicaps, they've moved me to 1036 and I'd not even realised, they use some sort of programme that works it out for you, but clearly it doesn't work any better, wether I'm first or last I still end up seventh if I even bother to find out and if it did work I would feel even more inadequate so I'm not really the person to argue the case for personal handicaps. Winning because they changed my handicap advantageously would be worse than the worse last place or humiliating rescue by woman that has ever befallen my sad ass down that lake. Equipment performance differences are understandable, but a golfing style approach is not what sailing is about imv. I want an accurate fact based boat performance index. Something that proves that the Blaze is actually faster than the EPS because it has more volume and more sail area and that the Phantom sits just in between most of the time because although it gets going in light it doesn't quite have the righting moment of the Blaze once the wind picks up. Not a system that is governed by who happens to be sailing what & where, or how many of them and wether or not they report the fact every so often. Waterline length, volume, sail area and aspect ratio, righting moment, rocker and wetted surface define how fast a boat is, not how many hotshots or muppets make returns, there's a place for that sort of thing, but it's not reality and unless you have actual reality you get the mess you have now, with a swirling chaos of numerics with no null point anchoring them. ------------- https://www.corekite.co.uk/snow-accessories-11-c.asp" rel="nofollow - Snow Equipment Deals https://www.corekite.co.uk" rel="nofollow - New Core Kite website |
Posted By: Medway Maniac
Date Posted: 03 Mar 14 at 1:45pm
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Agree 100% with Chris249. Cruisers sail mostly in displacement mode and even then IRC is not good enough. Mix in regular planing performance of dinghies (how do you propose to assess boats' planeworthiness' - its propensity to start planing and its efficiency when planing?) and your system will be less reliable than PY. I've been dabbling with the sort of calculations you are talking about for 20 years, and while I usually can give a reasonable ball-park estimate of speed, there are plenty of exceptions. The other thing will be that you need a different set of handicaps for every windstrength, and even if you had them the chances are you would use the wrong ones, given the way windspeed varies with time and location. But if you want to waste your time going up a blind alley... ------------- http://www.wilsoniansc.org.uk" rel="nofollow - Wilsonian SC http://www.3000class.org.uk" rel="nofollow - 3000 Class |
Posted By: JimC
Date Posted: 03 Mar 14 at 5:33pm
What was it Churchill said about democracy?
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