Am I to understand that the issue concerns getting the data TO the committee?

I thought programs like Sailwave allowed the user to upload data in the correct format to the Portsmouth committee (or whomever)?

If it were as simple as clicking a button to upload data, would we still have as big a hurdle in revising DPN numbers?? If true, how hard is it to convince the race organizers (and software platforms) to make this happen? That would certainly make things easier than trying to have the committee hunt down various websites for results?

And I think it is certainly agreeable that distance races probably ought not to contribute significantly to handicap numbers.

But we originally were talking about boats with no prior DPN / rating and how to develop one, correct? That prompted my suggestion about polars..

+1 on foilers and non-foilers being too different to handicap correctly. Kind of like Tim's suggestion of starting Kite boards and cats together. Would be fun, but exceedingly difficult to handicap.

And I don't care what my DPN is, the Mug race and other pursuit type events are still fun in their own way... I'm sure a sailing canoe probably won that event once or twice in the history of that event.