[size:8pt][/size]Carbon mast,

Simply put, the olympic campaigners I spoke (both in and out of the AHPC network) felt that the switch to carbon was one of the best things happening to the tornado design. It made the boat better and the racing more equal. Mark Schneider has been all over this in the past (although he is increasingly going mental on other issues lately)

This makes for an interesting connundrum. On one hand some want carbon out of the class for marketing purposes and on the other hand they want it in for improved designs and racing. This discussion was also raging at the start of the F16 class and I think they 've done the right thing. Allow both and let the buyer decide which option suits him best. I personally chose alu as I'm not nearly good enough to get the max out of that, let alone a carbon mast. If I ever do then and only then will I see sufficient justification to pull out my wallet. This approach has proven to be surprisingly easy to explain to interested persons.

However, I'm convinced that the carbon mast option is very serious for the big O. and rightly so.


Lifting foils,

I have no info on that, nor do I see this option as likely on what I do know. However I've been a little bit out of the loop lately. The F16 rules already allow inward canted boards that do provide a limited amount of lift. This was the result of the discussions I had with Martin Fisher way back in the beginning of the F16 class. A compromise was included in the f16 rule set after learning of the experiences gained by Hans Klok, the current chairman on the class. He had a modified boat with inward canted boards with a significant angle. Summarizing, benefits of the curved and inward canted boards were two fold. -1- less wetted surface area by lifting. -2- less pitching due to the additional damping supplied by the foils. I put the question to martin and settled on 6 degrees as max angle as that would allow for significant damping but not allow for full lifting of the boat (break clear of surface when mishandled).

I envisioned full lifting to be bad for the class , especially in the early stages. Full lifting easily encloses large induced drag components making the boat slow in addition to difficult to handle well (crashes). So it was decided to go halfway and thus allow for some of the benefits without incurring the risks.

In hintsight, maybe 10 degrees of max canting would have been better but althogether I'm very happy with the path taken although not all builders have made max use of this potential yet. One must also remember that lifting foils was still a largelt unknown thing back then. Lots of believes and claims but not much hard data on which to base such a important decision as fixing the class rules of a fledgling class.

With 6 degrees of max canting you get 16 kg of additional lift in addition to damping of pitching, compare this to a total of 240 kg that the leeward hull needs to support. With 10 degrees max canting you get 26 kg and about 1.5 times more stiff damping. The latter also more restant to the hulls from following the contours of larger waves (not chop) that one has to follow or risk the mainbeam hittinh the tops. As said earlier I looked for a good optimum, in discussions with martin and others, while allowing some of the proven benefits.

It was the right choice (compromise) for a new class and one that would also see lots of recreational sailors. Any Olympic selection was way beyond dreams back then. For a purpose build olympic cat I would make a different decision on what I now know. But maybe not for any true F16 type design. Basically I see a 130 kg platform with lifting foils as somewhat of a strange thing when compared to a 107 kg platform with slighly inward canted boards. Afterall, the first 23 kg of lifting will be taken up by the weight difference requiring the 130 kg design to be lifted by 40 kg's before it will pass a 107 kg platform with only a modest 16 kg a net lifting. Requiring the first to have canting somewhere around 18 degrees which is significant. And still the lighter boat will accellerate faster and both may also plane easily thus negating some of the foil lifting benefits.

Lifting foils on a 180 or up large cat with a big 2 male crew (350 kg combined with lots of sailpower) Yeah, I believe in that, but not nearly as much on light low drag design with medium crewweigh (240 kg combo) and much smaller sail loads because of limited righting moment like that on F16's. Note that sail loads are directly related to the amount of lifting that may be created by canted foils. T-foils are different in this respect and curved foils are sort of a mix between these two.

Anyway I doubt whether a special foil package is in the works for any boat except the nacra 17 as that would conflict directly with the established class rules, the grown fleets and ISAF recognized status that the other proposed boats have.

Anyway, I will stop my rant now.

Wouter