>>Most of the sail I have been doing is in light winds, under 15 mph. I generally lose ground to the F18s upwind but can keep up off the wind under spinnaker.

Sloop sailing or catrigged (both with spi) ?

I know that under special conditions the differences between boats do play up. Was this race doublehanded or singlehanded. Especially when singlehanding the Taipan become sensitive to certain chop.


>>Speed comparisons between the F18 and F16HP are difficult because they are so dependent on the skills of all the sailors involved.

Indeed and the F18 guys aren't getting slower as well. Looks like F18 sailing is doing well in the US by now with regular races with good turn-outs. This is bound to have good effect on the sailing skills of the F18 sailors.

This is one reason why I want to gether as much data as possible :

I used the JPOR data and found the following.

Here we had an equal number of F16's and F18's so I could count only the top 2 boats of each class and compare those with eachother this makes the result far less sensitive to an individual skill of a crew or luck. It is always far easier to have bad luck than good luck.

The result was this :

JPOR

1 F18 (Runge) F16 (Lindsay) F16 (Harnden) F18 (Hubel) F16 (Stern) F18 DNS (Murray)
2 F18 (Murray) F16 (Lindsay) F18 (Hubel) F16 (Harnden) F18 (Runge) F16 (Stern)
3 F16 (Lindsay) F16 (Harnden) F18 (Hubel) F18 (Runge) F16 (Stern) F18 DNS (Murray)
4 F18 (Murray) F16 (Harnden) F16 (Linday) F18 (Hubel) F18 (Runge) F16 (Stern)
5 F18 (Murray) F18 (Hubel) F16 (Harnden) F18 (Hubel) F16 (Stern) F16 (Lindsay)

Only listing the top 2 boats of each class :

1 F18 F16 F16 F18
2 F18 F16 F18 F16
3 F16 F16 F18 F18
4 F18 F16 F16 F18
5 F18 F18 F16 (*F18*) F16

Score F18 = (1 + 4) + (1 + 3) + (3 + 4) + (1 + 4) + (1 + 2) = 5 + 4 + 7 + 5 + 3 = 24
Score F16 = (2 + 3) + (2 + 4) + (1 + 2) + (2 + 3) + (3 + 5) = 5 + 6 + 3 + 5 + 8 = 27

The score is pretty even really; the spread is pretty much constantly changing as well.It is not like if there is a fixed pattern in it where it is always F18 F16 F18 F16 for example.

When not looking at any more info about this race than an observer would assume the two designs are pretty evenly match to eachother.


>>My performance tends to drop off as the wind increases but this may be partly due to crew weight

I hear you are very good in the light conditions; It seems to be your speciality. We all have one.


>>In regards to the times from the JPOR, I don't think there were any times as the race committee only recorded the order in which boats crossed the finish line in the F18/F16HP fleet.

From the final results it looked like this worked out well. Is there something that we don't see from the data. If any crew considered far superior to all others ?

By the way was Seth sailing singlehanded ? Any of the others singlehanding ?



Just my thoughts.

Jennifer