Mark made an interesting post here and I thought it worthy of a new thread. Mark's original Post:
One of the underlying assumptions of the Portsmouth system has been negated and that is why the rating for the Supercat 20 is inaccurate.
The assumption is that the class of boat being rated is being sailed competitively. The idea is that a group of competitive sailors will figure the boat out, maintain the sails in competitive shape and compete against other classes of comparably skilled racers. The elapsed time data will allow the class of boat to be rated accurately relative to its peers. The Supercat 20 is not been actively raced in 2002 nor has it been actively raced for the last 20 years.
The recent data used to calculate the current rating has been collected from a small number of casual racers competing in small local regattas using the original sails. I don;t know when this boat class has conducted a nationals much less a one design event. The problem is that the latest data points have gradually supplanted the 20 year old data. The old data was used to compute an accurate Portsmouth rating. Portsmouth used to rate this class of boat as faster then a classic tornado. Usually this is not a problem because few competitive sailors choose to rehab these old designs and spend the cash for new sails etc etc. (When was the last time you saw a Prindle 18 with new sails competing at a major event.)
The monohull Portsmouth fleets face the same issues. Sailing World had an article several years ago describing how Dennis Conners took a 20 year old phrf boat and put a top of the line bottom job along with new sails and good hardware, and dry sailed the boat. He cleaned up in the San Diego PHRF fleet. We all recognize that handicap racing has this limitation.
Darline H has asked me and another sailor several months ago (well before the steeple chase) to look into this quirk in Portsmouth, collect some information and propose some solutions. Since I have put the boats away for the winter, I should be able to get going.
One solution that I am considering proposing is to sort the boat classes into two divisions, Competitive and One off or inactive. I would define those classes that are competitively raced as those conducting a nationals with at least 7 boats in attendance within the last 2 ?? years. The Portsmouth calculation would remain the same for these classes of boats. We must change the method for updating the one off boats / dead boat society classes of boats. We would not continue to routinely update the database which has lead to the observed drift of Portsmouth ratings upwards. Instead, the ratings would be frozen at levels which accurately estimated the boats performance relatively to its peers in the past.
Another proposed solution is to not let Portsmouth ratings correct upwards? If a boat class earns a rating of 61.0 then the only thing that poor equipment or sailor skill can do is degrade the boats performance and raise the rating number, however these corrections would not be accurate and unfair to competitors competing against the sailors of these types of boats. I am very interested in any critiques or comments.
