In all honest both the builders and class know that the F16's can be build lighter than the current minimum weight.

I'm sure we can get it down by some 6 - 10 kg's ; lest say below 100 kg while still flying a spi of 17 square mtr. and having two blokes on the wire. If we really wanted to and put in some dough into it we could use some more exotic materials for the hulls and get the craft as low as 90-95 kg's and that will be about it. Even the builders said they could do it.

But here comes the trick; the question is not "can we get it down there ?" but "do we want to get it down there"

In past you were part of the discussions about this in the class and indeed you were personally very much in favour of going as low as possible. I must say that I personally saw the attractions of it. But the class as a whole and the builders in particular didn't see much use in it. It would make the craft relatively expensive. Example : The A-cats are here now almost as expensive as fully fitted F18's and these are already some 10-15 % more expensive then the F16's and some 25 % more expensive than Hobie 16's and Dart 18's.

There is always a balance between performance (weight) and cost and simply put we, we couldn't get the class started if we went under 100 kg's without a spi. So what was the class to do. Throw away the exiting promise of this class because we couldn't get those last 5 kg's ?

No, I think that the class as a whole did exactly the right thing. Did we bow out to anyone ? AHPC had to accept the inclusion of carbon masts, Taipan sailors the increase in width and general openess of the rules, Stealth had to shave a few kg's of their Stealth R platform to get to minimum weight and Bimare had to cut down on mast length. 3 parties choose to rejoys over their wins and learn to live with thier losses, one went his own way. 3 out of 4 seems like a very good score to me.

End result is still the lightest doublehanded (spinnaker) boat and that has the overall performance that is on a level with the F18 class and A-cats AND that is also very affordable if not noticably less expensive than all of its competitors (A-cats, F18's, FX, I-17R, F20's, M20)

And so we accept our loss in WOW factor (less weight) and rejoyce over over gains. We change the new from F16 High Tech to F16 High Performance at the same time. Now we just call it F16.

Wouter