Howdy Martien,

I think you have been mislead on the Viper's misfortune in the Nam-Rem race.

My view of the world on this day goes like this.

Start of the race was dominated by Matt Mcdonald with Hans, Greg, myself, Gill & Geert chasing closely behind. The positions behind matt only changed due to the wind shifts & patches that were occuring. Just prior to the first gate matt suffered some brain fade and lost some advantage out to sea & literally all of the abovementioned F16's went thru this gate within 2 minutes of each other (Hans was leading and had overlayed the gate). After goin thru this gate the breeze was really swirling & patchy which enabled Hans to take off into the distance with Greg, myself & Matt to battle it out to the turning mark ( Gill close behind & Geert broke some gear).
The reach out to sea was dominated my Matt as he passed myself & was closing on Greg ( infact I believe we both closed on Greg). Hans was 3-4minutes in the lead. As Greg, Matt & myself went around the sea mark, we were within 30 seconds of eachother with Gill 1-2 minutes behind.
The reach from this sea mark to the gate was a bit tight for kitework. Hans & myself elected to sail higher without kites & Matt and Greg went low with kites (Gutsy move, but every time I looked under the foot of my main all I saw was kite luff's stalling & flogging without making any significant grounds).
I went for the kite on 1 occiasion for about 10 minutes & still decided the rhumb line was more achievable without the kite. When I saw Matt approaching with a broken spi pole, my immediate reaction was that's the risk for trying the kite (all the shock loads that occur when trying to sail high) was not worth it.
At about this point greg was 500-700m lower than Hans, myself & Matt. Greg then dropped the kite to lay the gate for the run back to zandvoort. They were sailing pretty high for about 200-300m before they saw us smiling at them <img src="http://www.catsailor.com/forums/images/graemlins/tongue.gif" alt="" /> & they then realised the gate was lower & reached to the gate where only 1-2 minutes covered Hans, myself & Greg (Matt was now out the back door with no spin available). After the gate (all spinnaker work),I got past Hans & put an extra 8 minutes on greg, gill closed the gap to greg as did Frank Boom.

So at the end of the day I believe the gate error probably only cost greg about 1min, mavbe 1.5min at the absolute maximum.

If we are talking performance's for the day, My ranking of upwind speed was dominated by Matt & the downwind speed dominated by Hans & Myself.

Just my obvervations.