Tami
The deal with Formula, A class and Tornado sails is the presence or absence of the measurement sticker. If the owner has paid for the independent measurement he is class legal and registers and races using the ratings table (Schrs or Portsmouth... no adjustments).

If he has NOT paid for the sticker and independent measurement ... he is not class legal and MUST take the hit on his PN rating... Mind you, It's the exact same sail.

The Sail shapes and proportions between two F18 measured sails could be quite different. The class uses's a Formula to compute sail area and there are different ways to skin the cat. So long as both are measured in.... the racing is "fair" using handicap ratings. For the scorekeeper, either he registers correctly or a competitor protests him for not having class legal sails.

Bert obviously does not believe that street legal F18 or A class sails equate to fair racing under portsmouth stock numbers.

Portsmouth simply can't generate the data to do what Jake and his sail fairy believes which is to fix the ratings with non existent race data. Bert basically agree's with me and says... well, in the absence of statistics... we use other tools... the PHRF rating tools! My position is that Portsmouth is Broken and PHRF is not the best option. SCHRS/Texel have been used for YEARS for beach cats and is widely accepted by most hard core racers overseas as fair as can be.

I do agree with Jake on one point... the precision of a rating system is WAY OVERSTATED.... it ain't one design folks. .... boats overlapped WON"T be discriminated in PN or SCHRS. In a tight race on handicap.... the numbers fall where they do... Is it truly a measure of who won that race... .. who knows!... the precision of the rating system just can't do the job..

Also, people must realize this is just part of handicap racing. ... if 10 perfectly sailed Identical boats hit the A mark stacked end to end.. with 9 on starbord and 1 in first place on port.... the Port boat will come out 10th based on the RRS. a rating system of ANY KIND simply can't do any better. The rating systems we use (portsmouth and SCHRS and PHRF)have resolution that matches the real world... (This is why you don't use the 8th decimal places to decide a winner)