"The strong points of the Isotope are that its balanced helm allows it to out point any other catamaran to windward". LOL. A real F16 class winner they have their.
Again, that's a bit of dated marketing hyperbole. I did outpoint a Nacra I20 on an Isotope in a race several years ago, but I doubt I'd be able to outpoint a modern A-class cat.
FYI, the Viper is more than 6 years old, probably a 8 or 9 year old design, there are boats from 2009.
Sorry, I was going by sailboatdata.com, which says the Viper F16 was first built in 2010. Wikipedia says the Viper was first made in 2007, so go ahead and change that to 52 years old vs. 9 years old.
Anyway, on SCHRS, it does punish single handing in many cases fairly 'harshly', on paper. For example, we have a Viper F16 that races solo but in the doublehanded configuration (with jib). His rating is 0.964 when you plug in the Viper F16 data into the formula (the data on the SCHRS website), then plug in 1 and 1 for # of crew and # of crew trapezing. That is very very slightly slower than a Nacra 20. You can see the results here:
www.wrcra.orgOn the water results tend to suggest this configuration is fairly similar in speed to the N20 across a wide range of wind conditions (neglecting sea state, it is fairly flat where these races occur).
Yes, SCHRS's penalty for sailing an Isotope singlehanded is over 10% (1.050/1.157, compared to a less than 5% (1.002/1.050 or 1.105/1.157)penalty if I added an F16-size spinnaker. 40 years of Isotopes racing 1-up vs. 2-up against each other indicates a less than 4% difference (although I could probably be talked into 5%).
Now I'm just a club-level racer competing in a small local fleet, so I don't hold any delusion that I'm sailing my boat to its full potential. There are many sailors out there who are much faster than I. Nevertheless, I still would like a rating that yields a fair test of skill. Does anybody really think that if you took two equally skilled sailors, put one on an Isotope with main and jib, and the other on a Viper F16 with main and spinnaker, that the two should finish a 60 min race within 4 seconds of each other? I'd like to think that boat design has advanced more than that in 40 years.
