Not their finest hour. When a young designer with an open mind like Juan K spots a gap in a rating system he is not going to hold back. There had been many examples of IOR rule-busters, including Jerry Milgram’s 38ft cat-rigged schooner Cascadewhich rated as a 28ft sloop, and later the French una-rigged L’Effraie (right) which walked the 1976 Mini Ton Cup. But Juan K’s1999 IMS 50 Krazy K(left) was a different situation, her fixed unstayed wingmast designed for upwind efficiency rather than as a pure rule dodge. In flat water ahead of the 1999 Admiral’s Cup she flew, though no one had yet seen her in waves. Nevertheless two rival IMS 50 owners had seen enough and threatened to pull their boats from the event if the French yacht was not slowed down. In a very low moment for IMS an arbitrary much higher rating was handed to the Juan K design, the owner pulled out and the French team went home. Not coincidentally that was the last time the Admiral’s Cup ran as the pinnacle offshore regatta – the next and final series in 2003 being a pale imitation of the original
the ORC left its Solent moorings and set off overseas, now in virtual mode with no office as such but still with Bruno Finzi at the helm. Olin Stephens was the original master of the IOR, and he managed
its development over the years, successfully seeing off most (but not all) attempts by designers to poke holes in his creation. The job of the ITC was to react to these new paths to obtaining faster boats for their ratings with tweaks of the rule – these tweaks were sometimes quite unpopular… The primary objective has always been to protect the existing
fleet from new ‘monsters’ that would make all other boats obsolete. The design evolution could not be stopped, however, and the newer racers always had an edge over older designs, the new boats now specifically designed around the IOR measurement points. Annual ITC meetings in London were very lively, but important decisions were being taken that would have serious effects on large fleets of expensive yachts raced by extremely competitive skippers. However, in spite of constant fine-tuning, by the mid-1980s the
rule was under severe scrutiny. The Irving Pratt project at MIT was working on an alternative approach with the support of a group of US sailors. The project was developing a new measurement method that would avoid point measurements on the hull, and a VPP to predict a calculated performance of a boat in a given wind range – not just a single number coefficient for all courses and wind conditions. This so-called Measurement Handicap System (MHS) was
adopted in 1985 by ORC, to be renamed IMS and promoted world- wide alongside the IOR. The system was directed towards dual- purpose boats, leaving use of IOR for the racing community. The last edition of the IOR software was distributed in 1995 (it still runs on modern computers) and a handful of IOR certificates are still issued each year to small fleets of boats from that era. The new IMS employed the same measurement parameters for rig, sails and flotation but now required ‘machine’ hull measurement. When new-generation boats were designed and built to this new
system in the early 1990s and proved to be faster and easier to sail than their IOR cousins, then IMS steadily took over, with many
of the big events run under IMS for about a decade, until the 2005 split with RORC and US Sailing. The VPP in the IMS system went through a major overhaul in 2007 and was renamed ORC in 2008, for which thousands of hull shapes have since been measured. Besides rule development ORC has also had a role in assisting
race organisers in using the rating system at events, making yearly improvements to a guidebook of championship rules known as ‘the Green Book’. Its use began at the Admiral’s Cup in the IOR era and is still in use today for the ORC World and European Championships held in Europe since 1999. These events have grown in popularity, in part because ORC’s Green Book committee has been careful to let the standards evolve with the fleet, while adopting market-driven policies including rotating events between the Med and Baltic regions. In recent years the ORC has launched a special version of the
rule adapted to superyachts (over 100ft in length) that is centrally managed and issues about 100 certificates each year for use at major regattas. And with help and guidance from Larry Rosenfeld ORC is also currently developing its own new VPP for multihulls. To promote better understanding of the system the documen-
tation for ORC rules and the VPP is always available online (
orc.org). Access to the design/VPP database is also provided, allowing users to browse certificates for free, and also for a small fee to run tests changing any measurement parameter using an online facility called Sailor Services. This is made possible because the popularity of the system allows ORC to afford to have good programmers on the technical staff to keep up with this kind of open access. This helps everyone – designers, race organisers, owners,
measurers and so on – all to be on the same page in their use of the system, and at this time of year at the annual meetings to share their ideas for improvement. For 50 years this has been a good model to service our
community, and the founders should be applauded for having the foresight to create the structure needed to continue this service in such an enduring and sustainable way. Nicola Sironi, ORC chief measurer
q SEAHORSE 37
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