There are some more statements in that ITA section that may be considered strenious.

I wouldn't know how to spend €100.000 on a compliant F18 or F16 and make it show up in the performance beyond say a boat made for €25.000.

Alot of people think that money is the only influence factor for performance (more = faster) and that something that is custom made is automatically better. This is quite often based on misunderstanding the situation. One can only improve a product by having it custom made when the builder knows exactly how the product behaves with respect to even very small changes. This may be true for clothing, but this is certainly not true for sailboat design. Sailboat design still is to a large extend a black art, mixed with large amounts of personal preference and emperical knowlegde. It is impracticle, if not impossible, to achieve significant performance differences by custom designing and custom building a racing boat like the F18.

Look at how much money and time is spend on sail development and how little the steps of improvement really are ?

Wouter