SORC 1998

After a good bit of scrutiny the rating committee has chosen to make a significant change in the fundamental formula used to crunch the measurements into a rating. As you may know each of the components of this formula has an exponent which modifies it's contribution to the final rating. If you visit our page on other measurement based formulas you will notice their main difference are simply these exponents, which is to say how the same basic speed promoting and reducing characteristics are balanced.

Quite honestly our rating formula was built around an old paradigm based on heavy boats and offshore sailing before carbon, kevlar, mylar and smaller lightweight boats started to predominate. It had become apparent that while yielding good results in most racing it had room for improvement in the more competitive arenas. Another example of competition improving something.

As you can see from the table below only the exponent effecting weight has been modified from .25 to .3. The result is that lighter boats will be negatively effected and heavier boats helped. The hope is that the apparent performance differences between the lightest boats in the fleet such as the F25C's and the rest of the fleet especially the heavier cruising boats will be helped. Please keep in mind that increasing the importance of weight also decreases the importance of the other two components. To test this change we applied the new rating formula to SORC '96 and graphed the two races together for all 6 races and the cumulative. Click here to see the graphs.

Copyright MASF 2/3/97  Last updated:  01/15/98,  Click here to send mail to web administrator.
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