ORC
Notes from a championship
ORC’s annual world championships are important stress tests for the integrity of the rating system: not just the VPP and how ratings are created but all the other features as well. It’s from these events that feedback loops are created that help update the ORC’s Green Book, that Bible of championship regatta rules and standards that goes back into the IOR era of big international team events. Much has changed since then, but the idea that championship
events need recognised rules and standards has not, and the late Paolo Massarini was at the forefront of this effort on behalf of ORC for over a decade. Take, for example, country qualifications. To validate a champion -
ship a prescribed number of teams from outside the home nation is required, and conversely a maximum number from the host nation is also prescribed so there is sufficient diversity to carry the label ‘Worlds’. In more recent years the addition of all-amateur Corinthian divisions was introduced, with most teams in the Baltic nations recognising this as an important feature for their style of sailing. Another feature is the choice of class splits to use to define the
three classes at a major ORC regatta. In ORC this is prescribed in the rules by a number called CDL, or Class Division Length. The GPH (General Purpose Handicap) was used for many years
as the class split tool, but then some clever teams worked out that you could have a low GPH to qualify to be in a slow class but still have a fast boat upwind where it counted in windward/leeward racing. Pedro Campos was famous for this: in a class of 36-footers his Synergia 40s would have their GPH ratings slowed with use of small downwind sails. But being first to the top mark is always more valuable because
then defending this position downwind is comparatively easy compared to vice versa – especially in heavier old-school monohulls where surfing past an opponent is rarely on the cards.
40 SEAHORSE So CDL targets were invented, based upon a boat’s upwind speed
in 12kt, and these are now printed on all certificates. The scheme, promoted by Massarini, has worked as intended: now there are series-built boats that are rated intentionally at the favoured top positions in each class while others with some tweaking can also still get there: Club Swan 42s are an example at the top of Class B and similarly the pretty Italia 11.98s in Class C. Yet in Tallinn these designs were not guaranteed winners. Class
B was won by a well-prepared pro team from the Med racing on the new Grand Soleil 44 designed by ORC designer wunderkind Matteo Polli, not the usual ClubSwan 42. The latter design is usually assumed to be the performance benchmark in ORC racing, yet these days this seems to correlate closer to a team’s sailing abilities rather than simply boat type. The other perennially favoured Class B designs were traditionally
thought to be the Danish-built X-41s, but this too is probably a false bias because so many competed for so long in the Baltic region as a competitive one-design class driving up performance. Class C was this year won by the Estonian pro team on Matilda,
a modified J-112E, repeating class wins in 2018 in The Hague and in 2019 in Sweden in the Europeans. In a breeze they rate very similarly to the larger Italia 11.98. Class A could have been won (again) by a TP52, but for a dropped
kite on the last day which allowed a well-sailed – but not ORC- optimised – Mills 45 built at Premier Composites as an IRC boat to show impressive competitiveness in ORC as well. This was a great surprise to the owner, who bought it from the Australians never imagining that it could ever be a TP52 giant-killer. A feature under constant discussion was race formats: having
space in a week for a 200-mile long offshore and a shorter coastal race, some complained the geometry was too close to being just
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