Adding it All Up – February 3rd, 2008

Remember the Handicap Hotlaps project ? I talked about it here four weeks ago. Interested sailors were invited to sail a simple, standard course (NYC B1A) under constant conditions and then log all their solo laptimes on the Trudeau Handicaps Hotlaps thread. The goal is to use the accumulated results from many skippers sailing multiple boats to make an objective, practical handicapping system that weights raceboats based on their in-water performance. Such a PHRF-SL system might allow different boats to race against each other fairly.

With handicapping, a good, caffeinated skipper at the helm of a ’slow boat’ could legitimately triumph over a competitor in a faster-scripted vessel who’s drinking chardonnay and talking on a cellphone. That’s fair, right? People have legitimately complained about this for as long as I have been sailing SL, and the issue remains a problem in competitions such as the NYC Big-Boat Races, the upcoming SYC Passages Races, and the Sunday SYC Regatta mixed-fleet races.

Over the past month more than a dozen sailors have logged nearly 120 lap times for the project! Woots to: M1sha Dallin, Bea Woodget, RnSdriver Lane, Oliphant Ming, Taku Raymaker, joepie Korobase, Jane Fossett, Manul Rotaru, Hpathe Boucher, Liv Leigh, Rabog Rabeni, Gemma Vuckovic, Vin Mariani, and Harmony Bloch!

Here is the summary for fifteen different boats so far (the full table is here). For each boat, the table on the right lists the average net lap time (Finish time minus Start time) and the standard deviation. The final column calculates a relative performance ‘weight’ to make boat comparisons easy, using the Trucordia Yawl as the reference boat (with a ‘weight’ of “1.00?).

A quick look at the table shows that the Defender II, Friendship Sloop, and JaqCat are all an equal match for the Yawl on the B1A test course. The Sea Sharp, Ketch, Trudeau 32, and BlueWater Schooner are all slower, consistent with Jacqueline Trudeau’s scripting for those boats. Confirming most sailors’ reports, the Larinda Schooner is more than 10% faster than the Yawl, and it’s lap time is roughly equivalent to the Tetra 35 v1.2’s performance. Perhaps no surprise, an ACA32 is even faster than that, rounding the course nearly 30% ahead of a Yawl.

Although the ACC boat does not use the windsetter, Manul Rotaru deserves applause for adjusting his ACC’s boatwind to NYC Hotlaps settings and completing several runs on B1A. His lap times show that the ACC is remarkably faster than either the ACA32 or Larinda, and it’s more than 80% faster than a Yawl. The fastest boat so far in the Handicap Hotlaps is the TruCor Beach Cat. It came in with scores nearly twice as fast as a Yawl.

The results are intriguing so far, but the Handicaps project will get much more interesting as more boats are added to the list, and as more skippers contribute lap data. It’s notable that two of the most popular sailboats, the Tako and Fizz were not included in the original handicap trials. That happened because the handicap was originally designed to rate boats for PHRF-style mixed fleet racing, and the Tako and Fizz seemed to hang out with a different, more One-Design crowd. That obviously was a mistake, and it would be very valuable to have lap information on those boats as part of the growing database.

If you want to add your scores to the Handicap Hotlaps, go here for all the info; I will keep updating the spreadsheets, and talking about the results here as we go along.

!!ADDENDUM!!

Less than an hour after I posted this article, I discovered Svar Beckersted’s new water sims were under installation. The eight new sims [and more to come!] will greatly expand the navigable waters in the USS. Unfortunately, the changes in geography mean that the NYC B1A race course no longer works. This offers a wonderful opportunity to set up a new Handicaps Hotlap course designed to compare performance across the spectrum of sailing vessels.

Watch for more news in a day or two, as soon as the tectonic plates come to rest in their new positions in the Southwestern USS!