Inset left: the failed cradle that led to the beautiful Reichel/Pugh 130-footer My Song (left) – complete with rig – falling over the side of the freighter that was bringing her back to Italy last year after a winter spent racing in the Caribbean. My Song was the most public of several incidents last year involving large yachts which has not made it any easier to get cover for some of the world’s fastest boats – especially for racing. Historically ocean racing yachts have been difficult – and on occasion impossible – to insure, especially for big shorthanded races where premiums as high as 40 per cent of value are not unknown, which is why big sailing sponsors often self-insure their own boats. And the underwriters are not always logical; though carbon masts are broadly more reliable than their aluminium predecessors there are insurers who still consider them experimental technology…
Owners are now given a large puzzle and little time to solve it. Then again, with IRC still on the simple but crude 75% mid-girth limit to distinguish a jib from a kite and roughly half the combined scoring at these dual-scored events driven by the IRC score, as well as that I reckon 99.9% of the existing kites are built to the 75% mid-girth rule. So my second thought is that it might not be that much of a disaster after all!
The 2020 worlds combined scoring was recently announced as ‘a little more complex’ and somewhat different from in 2018 (in The Hague, Holland): ‘Corrected times calculated for ORC and IRC will be shown as deltas to the winning boat where the winning boat in each rating system will have a corrected time of “00:00:00” and all others will have corrected time calculated as the difference in time to the winner.’
For this year’s IRC-ORC Worlds ORC results will be calculated using the Coastal/Long Distance Time-on-Time scoring model, while inshore races will be scored using Performance Curve Scoring (PCS) with a Constructed course. In The Hague this was the Time-on-Time Offshore Single Number system for the offshore races and the Time- on-Time Triple Number system for the inshore races. The combined score was then achieved by adding up the points scored for each IRC and ORC and dividing the points total by two. Not this year, however, not just because of using ORC Perfor- mance Curve Scoring but also because the combined scoring this
year is based on a single corrected time calculated as the average of the boat’s corrected times in ORC and IRC. Hope you are still with me?
Reading press releases: ‘The system we agreed to we think will minimise differences in the two rule systems,’ says ORC chief mea- surer Zoran Grubisa, who with Jason Smithwick from IRC co-chairs the event’s technical committee. ‘We have tested this and believe this will be an improvement on what we did in The Hague in 2018.’ My perception is that the chance of achieving fairer scoring transparency on the water has been considerably diminished. When racing, certainly when the racing is close, the competitors will have little idea of their relative corrected positions. Which affects tactical choices and so the game will be ‘just go for the finish as fast as you can and hope for the best…’
The Dutch, decades ago in the IMS days, decided for that reason to go for Time-on-Time Triple Number for inshore racing and accept the theoretical lesser accuracy in favour of a better perception of your corrected time position against the competition on the water. It is also somewhat strange to vary scoring systems for the world championship title each year. Looking at balancing what is anyway the experimental character of the combined scoring I feel a better compromise could have been to stick with Time-on-Time Triple Number for the ORC component but support dividing the total of the corrected times by two for a single points result. Funny thing is that working with Performance Curve Scoring will in fact lead to competitors using the IRC TCC on the water to get a feel for their position. Not sure whether that was the intention when ORC pushed for PCS!
Whatever the politics, having a good number of combined IRC-ORC scored events on the US east coast will help to get a better feel for both rating systems as well as for their scoring options. And for how to optimise for each of these systems. How to optimise for both at the same time is a bit more complicated and to me this is a positive point.
Wishing all competitors a great time! When in doubt, just optimise to be fast and just leg it to the finish. Rob Weiland, TP52 and Maxi72 class manager
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