Like every promoter the T class lied about 33 knots speed of the tornado.

The fastest time ON A REACH that was every recorded on a Tornado either during speed trails in England OR the Bacardi Blast at Bermuda (1997 world championship fun race on a rest day) was a striking 23,48 knots !. All measurements were taken over a 500 yard or 500 mtr distance.

If you want you can see some MPEG footage of the event here : http://www.acay.com.au/~gonzo/tornado.mpeg

Here the commentator clearly inform us that the German crew won this fun event by taking 12.53 second to cover the distance at average speed of 27 LANDmiles/hour (otherwise he would have said knots).

I'm sure those 33 knots (38 landmiles/hour) claim of the Tornado is just a typo that has now been repeated for ohhh 8 years now. You would expect that someone would take the time to correct this error.

Don't believe much of what promotors say and research the matter. Often the claims a very easily disproved.

By very careful when any class assures that their beach catamarans reaches past 25 knot or speeds up beyond 25 knots on ANY course. With the extensive use of GPS units we now know that beach cats don't perform past 20 knots in a consistant way. Meaning under their own power. Maybe in a few very special cases you surf of a large wave right at the best time and hits 15 - 30 knots for 1 or 2 seconds but that is it.


Also all classes are extremely handy in building up their own superiority by double speak. Example : Tornado stays competitive as a platform for 6 a 7 years, of course (they say), all other stay that only some 3 years. This naturally leads to the "fact" that tornado's are cheaper to race, right ? Wrong ! The same tornado costs as good as TWICE as much to buy new than a good portion of all others. So in fact the end result may be that the two classes over a period of 6 years are about as expensive.

And so on and so on.

There are only two classes that I know off that don't venture into these shady area's and give it too you raw and exact.

The rest well, lets just say that they have or feel a need to play themselfs up beyond realistic proportions.

Wouter