2022 ORC Sportboat European Championship starts tomorrow
by Offshore Racing Congress 11 Oct 2022 22:33 BST
10-15 October 2022
Practice racing at Sistiana - 2022 ORC Sportboat European Championship © Andrea Carloni
After two days of preparation and measurement, racing is ready to start tomorrow for the 2022 ORC Sportboat European Championship being held at the Diporto Nautico Sistiana.
Twenty-one teams from six nations have come to compete in two classes, A and B. They represent mostly popular series-built designs that are raced throughout Europe. The complete scratch sheet of entries can be found here.
Examples include the 7 Melges 24's entered from Italy, Slovenia and Spain, three Italian Este 24's and three Italian Ufo 22's. These are from established classes sailed for many years as one-designs.
Others are custom or semi-custom designs, with all having been measured using the ORC Sportboat rules and and rated with the ORC VPP.
There are a couple of relatively new designs from designer Matteo Polli featured here in Sistiana this week.
One is Ott Kikkas's Corsa 915 SUGAR from Estonia built by Magnani in Italy and raced by members of his 2022 ORC Class C World Championship team.
The other is Fabio Bignolini's new Eco Racer 25 ECORACER BY NMG EUROPE (shown above) built by Northern Light Composites, also in Italy. This innovative design is the first fully recyclable flax fiber boat in the world. Bignolini and team made a strong impression by winning today's practice race, but only by 3 seconds in corrected time over Ugo Guarnieri's veteran Delta 84 CHARDONNAY, a past champion at this event.
Racing starts tomorrow with a Coastal race of 21.8 miles held offshore of the venue at Sistiana in the northern Adriatic, followed on Thursday through Saturday with a series of short inshore windward/leeward races.
These shorter races will be about an hour's duration will also be held off the coast of Sistiana.
"We are pleased to have a strong and diverse group of entries from a wide number of countries at this year's ORC Sportboat European Championship," said Bruno Finzi, Chairman of ORC. "This helps show that our rule system can provide confidence for fair racing in these boat types as well as with larger monohulls, multihulls and Superyachts we well."
Tune in to the event website for more information, results and photos: orcsportboat2022.eu.