See, this is why I think there should be an exact distance measured for the course and it should be easy now that we all have hand-held GPS available.
If every "NA's" course were a measured mile (or 1.5, or what ever, but all exactly the same) from A to C, you could easily make a valid comarison from boat type to boat type, given the exact wind speed and the time it takes each boat type to get from C to A and A to C, use that as some type of a rating system, voila, you have a better system, and you don't even have to be racing open class to do it. Just measure the distance and time at each NA's, where the best skippers are sailing their own boats. The Alter Cup is a bit skewed because if the "team" isn't right for the boat (too heavy, too light, etc), or new to that type of boat, or whatever, their times will be signifigantly slower than when the same team sails their own boat.
Yeah, but there are a lot of other variables that go into boat speed that you haven't yet measured; wave height, wave direction, wave period, amount of chop, amount of boat traffic/wake, wind speed, wind direction, peak wind gusts, period of wind shifts, range of wind shifts, .... there are way too many variables to try and calculate a performance based system without the boats sharing the same racing time on the same racing water.
