Jake,

Way to stir the pot.

If its not the weight issue, then its money.
For all but the very few select persons neither really matters, as the reason they got beat was most likely that they were out sailed.

If you are serious about competing, then you need equipment that is in the ball park with everyone else, 20 year old blown out sails will not quite do it. But we can not place a money limit effectivly. What about the guy sailing 16s with the new boat everyother year and new sails every year. Are we going to throw him out. At the least he is pumping a lot of good used boats into the market to hopefully grow the sport.

There are a bunch of voices on this forum always bitching about wanting more formula and/or box rule designs. Now they are bitching that you should not spend any money. Any new formula or box rule will have a lot of money and changes being done early in it existance as people try to sort it out. As it matures that optimum configurations will be sorted out and changes minimized. Look at the A-cat, not that much new development is being done now and several designs are out there all very competitive with each other.

I think its great to have new stuff out there. If this guy want to be a "technoweenie" and spend a lot of money, more power to him, but he better be spending at least equal time sailing it or it will not matter.


Matt