Enterprise number 1 is for sale by the looks of things. I'm sure someone on here would snap that up!?

But the first hurdle is a realistic price for the collection, i don't think any of those are worth thousands and most not even hundreds!

What we are is actually much LESS worried about our history than other sports. Look at car racing and you'll see that a historic racing car can sell for 20 million pounds. Look at road cycling, a growing sport, and you'll see museums and even chapels dedicated to the history of the sport.

Commiserations, and many thanks for your work in the past.

funny that, in contrast, if someone put up a cache of pre-war F1 cars, the valuations would be stratospheric. Those 14s, whether you understand so or not, are the dinghy equivalent of a Bugatti found rusting in a barn. 

Equally useless in utility terms of course, but collecting is a bit (totally?) mad; look at the values of some Beanie Babies (sadly not those abandoned by my daughter) or original Spiderman comics like those my mother threw away without consulting me. It all relies on a bigger-fool splashing more when the collector wants to cash in.

And i think you'll find 80% of dinghies sailed/raced these days are plastic. Even your beloved Merlins now acknowledge the foam-core FRP ones are miles faster. 

If you could show Uffa Fox (equivalent to Fangio and Enzo Ferrari combined) the man behind some of those 1930s (made with wood planks riveted onto wood ribs, metal plate plus cotton sails on wooden spars) a modern 14 or even Merlin, built in carbon or foam-sandwich FRP with carbon spars, modern sails, with adjustable everything, he'd violently disagree. 

In performance terms it'd be interesting to be able to compare the performance gains around the track of F1 cars and an Int14 since the 1930s. I'd guess in straight line speed gain the boats would have advanced most by far, but the cars will have benefited from tyre advances and downforce in their corners.

On the Ents and GPs, yes, superficially, they look the pretty much the same, but more to the point, if you could wipe them all out, what would your ideal replacement look like? Probably, superficially, pretty much the same thing. And an Ent or GP is equivalent to an Austin A40, not an F1 car. How different, in these terms is an A40 to a Fiesta. Engine at front, 2 doors at sides, 4 seats, big door at back. Same ol' same ol'.
 

So what would your perfect, history erased, all existing dinghies destroyed, new class look like - a single hander and a non-trap two-hander, being the bulk of the market.

Where is the light/robust/cheap balance struck? (being mostly mutually exclusive)

Where is the weight/performance/stability line drawn? 

Where does the sit-in/sit-on compromise lay?

Where does the crew-weight/righting moment/rig-size balance lay, given the above?

How will you prevent the people willing to hike hard from hammering the perchers?

I trust you learned a bit from the V1 experiment, but what revolutionary insights are RS and the rest not seeing?

we all know by now that, to iGRF, the Laws of Physics are an irrelevant red herring that have no bearing on the discussion at hand, whatever the subject may be.

Bet you had the common sense to stay in the bar!

If you can count the cups going round on an anemometer going round its to light to sail.

Keith Callaghans "Hadron" looks like it could be comfortable in a drifter and for older sailors.

I like the Enterprise sailing dinghy, light for it's size, easy to rig, easy to sail, even for a relative beginner, fast enough for competent sailors who want a seat, comfortable in a drifter, is their a modern dinghy to match ??

The aero is good in light winds but no where near as good as a British moth in a drifter on our small puddle. 

A massive generalisation but to my mind "new" boats either go down the route of working very well in a narrow set of conditions or look a lot like old boats and work quite well over a broad range.

Anecdotally some time back I remember a  mate coming home from a 505 event held in a F5/6 and telling me of a conversation with the Race Team "we knew you'd be no bother, L4000s in the same were a right pain" I suspect the 50s would have also coped with a F2 better.

And if you do sports like horse riding, cricket, or swimming - all popular activities - you'll probably use kit that hasn't changed any more than sailing has. 

What you're ignoring is that many classes had changed dramatically, as others have pointed out, and many areas of sailing have changed dramatically. The areas that have changed dramatically haven't done particularly well - how did windsurfing do when it threw away all the old classes?

There's been a lot of change in trapeze dinghies, and trapeze dinghies are now a much smaller part of the sport. Same thing with cats.

For many of us, the boat is just like a set of rules in other sports. The sport is in doing your best within those rules, so we're just as happy with rules from 1970 as people are with the rules of chess, which date back hundreds of years. Other people have a different way of looking at it and that's cool.

And, regarding possibly the fastest growing participation sport of the century so far, cycling, bikes are much the same as they were in the 1880s..... the difference between an 1885 Rover Safety and a modern Carbon racer is more like that between a 1960 Enterprise and a 2017 FRP Mk3 than an Firefly and a 49er.....

Like with like man.

 

To a great extent it's because the basic layout is right. Recumbents have their advantages but for racing they could only win in a very specific set of circumstances. 

And they are banned for the vast majority of events.

Given the success of cycling, the western world's #1 equipment-intensive sport in many ways, it's hard to see how it can be getting it wrong. Surely it is a lesson in doing it right?

I was thinking more about the elite levels of the sport

I'm sure that there are lots of experienced cyclists on this forum. How much does the best time trial bike cost that the top pros would be riding? How many people will directly support a top pro rider (pit crew)?