And they are all over the place indeed. I'm keeping an eye on that as is my responsibility as the chairman. We already handled this issue in late 2002. That is the advantage of having "dictator" Wouter as your chairman.





The idea of F16 is too allow "slowed down innovation" instead of out-right development. Meaning that as soon as a development proofs to be an significant improvement we will slow it down to a pace where it will garantee that older boats remain competitive for several years. We will still allow the feature but put a physical limit on it. After 5 years or so we assume that a true competitive crew needs to have a new boat anyway while the less competitive crews are still competitive enough on the older boats as their skill is the dominant limiting factor instead of the boat design. These older boats will then enter the new role of supplying attractively priced boats for new sailors, intermediate sailors and recreational sailors thus growing the class. As a class it is important to have some turn-over in boats. This is one reason why the F18's grew so fast the later years. It is not good to have a class where boats stay competitive for 10 years or more and that will seriously slow down class growth. It is devils balancing act I admit.

But it is important to see the F16 class and the canted board issue in this way. It also signals the cause to the A-class problems. Their class rules have never been set-up with the same amount of "maintaining-the-class" thinking. Not their fault the 60's were the pioneering time of beach-cats.





For some reason , development and innovation are often presented with a negative ring to them. I don't understand why. It is actually hard to design significant improvements into a modern catamaran. The Flyer hull shape is almost 10 years old and in the mean time not much was improved on the A-cats for example. Also by allowing innovation and fighting against the carbon-fibre scare the F16 class features carbon stocks and boards for a FRACTION of the price that other classes ask for glass boards and cluncy alu stocks. None of these are serious performance boostings innovations but they do safe you money and allow builders to put an extra layer of glass on the keel-lines.

We must really take care to not let the OD fallacy rule the F16 class. For example their is more difference between H16 boatweights than their is between F16's. The kevlar-glass Taipan hulls are more robust than the newest Hobie 16 hulls. All because of improved quality control and innovation. And still a new Hobie France H16 costs the same as a new Taipan F16 shipped all the way from Australia (see earlier post on this forum). So I ask :"what about some 15 second speed difference on the finish when the same allowance of innovation gives us such better boats ? It is not like any of us is losing races on 15 seconds in more than 1 % of the races" The difference between the numbers 1 to 3 are easily a great multiple of that.

Once again it is a devils balancing act but if you do it right you will win on all accounts. Both in fairness of racing and quality of the bought boats. And I can say that the way we walked this balancing act has helped us alot. I can't tell all but more and more builders and sailors are moving over to the F16 class simply because of it. We can welcome a 4th new F16 design in the foreseable future and it is going to be a real good one. The designers of these F16's (like the Stealth and Blade) are attracted to the class by the fact that they experience more freedom eminating from the F16 class rules while they feel the rule set is limiting enough to garantee fair racing. Not many builders enjoy putting a F18 at 180 kg weight, when they know that they can do it for 150 kg as well. However getting the F16 at 107 kg and make it go well is a challenge these guys respect and like to play with. It is a show of skill.




That and the fact that their is a powerstruggle between the development guys (the older generation) and the "lets make A-class OD" guys (the new generation). The new generation was attracted to the class but the A-class performance but never felt much love for the development side of the class.





Just cant the hulls inward and beat this rule. If you are lucky the sides of the hulls will act a little as planing surfaces as well. Anyway if the inward canting of boards gives a strong enough improvement than such a trade-off can easily be made.

Actually, and pardon me for that, the F16 rules are better developped in this respect. In rules like these you need to decouple items like boards and hulls. Just define a fixed reference system (like the vertical and horizontals when the boat is level on its waterline) and define the limits to that. This also allows the designers to optimize the postion of hulls and boards to one-another. It increases design freedom without creating loop-holes




Indeed, luckily we (I, Phill and others) saw it coming back in 2002 and we did something with it. Way ahead of the A-cat class and even before the F18 class rules on it.

As a final comment I would like to underline the F16 class setup once again. The class structure we have allows us to do these things. A more conventional structure would only have caused delays and more serious conflicts. I understand to for some our unconventionalness is difficult to appreciate but here you see a good example what a lean class structure and an active group of engineers with informal communication can do. It is what makes us strong and react in time and in a proportional manner. I srongly advice that we must keep the international organisation that way. The requirements of local organisations is different of course and see we designed alot of local freedom into the struture so that local groups can adapt fully to their local needs and requirements.

Anyways I will stop making your eyes tired now.

Regards,

Wouter