Don't you think the elapsed times will be collected and scored with all three ratings? They were the year you had a sizable F18HT fleet and the N20 fleet. You can't help but want to know who the overall winner is.

Why do you think you can market a big boat and a little boat winner? Think of the headlines of the hometown paper.
It's one race to the public.... It's either elapsed time or some lame attempt to explain handicapping.

IMO, with two OD fleets. The best solution is to score each leg on elapsed time and you score the regatta like a regatta or grab the volvo ocean race mode for scoring. Most believe that the boats are close in performance in breeze. But As Randy Smythe noted... in this kind of racing... you need to win the light air drifter races and survive the breeze on days. So he always built a team and boat to do that. You can't make up the time differences. IMO the public would understand a Tybee 500 race as a series of heats ... It's format would be like the Nascar championship series.

For the following years. .. teams could market... I won two legs and finished 4th overall etc. It sets up a ladder that you can measure improvement with. Smoking the fleet is great but doesn't generate all that much interest if the race is decided early.