I think your post may have ended up in the wrong thread Tim,

With respect to sailarea. Over time, I came to believe deeply that recreational sailors make for too much of it. Remarkable is that active racers couldn't care less. Rig specs that are important in order magnitude are :

-1- Sail shape
-2- Sail trim
-3- Mast height
-4- Mast shape
-5- Luff length
-6- Sail area

(I left sail sheeting out of it but that is of course the most dominant factor).

The amount of area is therefor at the very bottom of the list; Within reason of course. Meaning as the difference in area or less than 5 % of the total. Both experiences (reference testing of my own sail to that of the standard Taipan) and scientific models point very much in this direction. The newer mainsail shapes have better gust response and accellerate better or keep the crew better on the wire, but in the way of all-out speed they are the same. The old sails just need more active sheeting to keep the sail driving than the new shape sails. As we are a formula class and don't have identical sails we will always have this inequality. However it must not be forgotten that One-design sails suffer from similar problems depending on how motivated the particular sailmaker was when he made a certain OD sail. Best about Formula is that quality control is more assured with respect to sails, but that is a different topic.

Best way to picture the whole situation is to regard a volume of air as containing a fixed portion of energy that can be harvested by a sail. The size and (position) of this volume is fully determined by the luff length (mast height), pointing angle and boat speed. When the luffs are all pretty much the same than all designs have the same potential amount of harvested energy per second when skippered right. This makes these boats equal. When a certain skipper is unable to achieve sufficient boatspeed by correct trim than he will cross a smaller volume per second and harvest less energy than a competitor and therefor go slower. This is not because he rig can not go faster but because his skills are still insufficient to speed the boat up even more to cross a larger volume of energy and harvest more energy. So this is sort of a postive feedback angle that makes rather small differences in much larger differences on the water. But all can be overcome by skill.

It doesn't really matter much wether you have 2 or 3 inches more area on your leech than an older sail when the luff lengths and boat platforms are the same. A smaller sail with the right trim can harvest the maximum amount of energy from a volume of air than a slightly bigger sail. Actually the guys doing best in the F16 class now are all sailing with sails that are less then the maximum allowed area. This is because they are just better sails and the difference in area that we are talking about is too small to matter in a significant way. Take note however that the new sail shapes are more significant ! So when Matt become really competitive to Jennifer it is not because of the luff length or sail area but because of the newer sailshapes. Of course in a formula class we don't rule on sail shape and the difference is probablay still measured in than 30 seconds or less per hour of racing. One doesn't need much difference in skill to overcome that.

All in all things stay pretty far as 90 % of the end result is directly sailor skill related and independent of the used hardware (when that is reasonably comparable between the makes).

Actually the small increase in area is good news for the older Taipan boats. With this they can get the newer mainsail shapes without having to take area away from the foot of the sails and having to fix a traveller system on their booms. This keeps thing less expensive AND more equal. The last is easy to see when realizing that no matter what the new mainsail shapes will get introduced and be used in the Formula 16 class. Forcing the older boats to continue to sail with the old shapes or having to invest in modified boom systems is neither fair nor attractive. Remember sailshape is more important is the overall result than sail area. And this is another reason why the simplification of the rules is to be favoured over the old rule.

Wouter