A year or two back they held a trials in Europe to consider a catamaran to replace the Tornado in the Olympics. All the new hot 20 footers took on the Tornado. The Tornado won every heat. WHY??? The Tornado has a higher sail area to weight ratio and it has a higher righting moment to sail area ratio than any of the other boats in the race. Well done basics, fundamentals, will win every time.
The ISAF trial occured in March of 2000 in Quiberon France. The Marstrom 20 hit an underwater cable early in the week and was not able to sail (due to broken daggers) till the last day. An exert from an article, "The Marstrom 20 finally got out on the water. It had hit an underwater steel cable early in the week and was out of action pending repairs. In the only race it sailed, it walked away from the fleet."
The whole article can be found here:
http://old.cruisingworld.com/2000/03/isaf5.htmlI have a spreadsheet at work with a lot of the current popular US boats on it. Their weights, SA's, LWL, beam and DPN. I had Excel calculate the SA/wt for each of them. The M20 had something on the order of 1.1 ft^2/lb, more than anyother boat on the list.
M20 54.0 [58.0] (55.8) (54.0) [52.5]
TORN 58.8 63.0 60.9 58.5 55.5
RC-30 53.9 56.0 54.5 (52.8) 50.7
NI20 59.2 62.8 60.2 58.6 57.1
Interisting thing I see here is how similar the T is to the I-20. However what is more interisting is how much faster the RC-30 isn't vs the M-20. 100k??? dollars vs. ~17k, 30 ft full carbon monster (brute force) vs. a 20' modern "balanced approach" design. The boat is light, wide and carries plenty of sail.
I think it is undeniable that PROPERLY applied technology will always win over an older design, no matter how good.
