Guys and gals, if you are to change to a mathematical model as your method of handicapping, then you are going to have to take into account what sort of boats are going to mainly use that model.

Certainly if you are going to be using it for modern designs such as the F16, A's, some home builds, rather than older more established ( read heavily built boats ) then pick your model wisely as both Texel ( of which I have limited knowledge as the UK tends to use SCHRS ) and SCHRS have real peculiarites with certain boats.

SCHRS for example mercilessly penalises light boats ( such as the A's and single handed F16's ) where I feel most of the future classes are being established from. Any boat that is both light, single handed and has a jib has absolutely no chance to be able to perform to its handicap. The F16 class is a point in case under SCHRS with the single hander having a faster handicap than both F18 or Hurricane 5.9 which in reality is never going to be the case on the water.

On the other hand if your boats are heavy ( such as the F18 and Hurricane 5.9 ) by class rules, but have well developed modern high aspect sails with bouyant hulls to match then you are onto a winner and SCHRS is your baby.

I do realise that no mathematical model is going to be able to " handicap " everything correctly and this is why I advocated earlier that it has to be both reported and mathematical evidence which dictates a boats handicap. With modern sailing scoring programs such as Sailwave being used by lots of clubs to reduce the manpower to be able to run races, then its only a natural extension to use that data to report to a central computer for statistical analysis.

Only this way will the boats which fall outside of there mathematical model ever be able to do something about an incorrect handicap and computer generated models be adjusted to handicap correctly the next generation of boats. I personally think that with the amount of data available worldwide then it would be a relatively short time before the handicap system settled down to give a pretty fair opportunity for all boats.