First
Bimare makes good boats that are lightweight, and cost effective.

What didn’t get documented in the HT discussion was that there is a huge difference in HT weight and reinforcement between USA 1 and USA 24. Gale Browning's HT (sail #1) is probably in the 125kg range all up and she hasn’t really modified it. Sail #24 and up were reinforced for the rigors of the Worrell. Bimare added something like 6kgs to the Worrell boats and made them stiffer and stronger. So when an ex HT owner tells a story about a failure you need to consider the sail number in that story. The first 6-10 HT's were built more like Acats, with thin sterns and thin dagger trunks. These boats were not meant to be sailed in endurance distance races with breaking surf and marine life to run over.

Bimare actually made dramatic improvements in the Sail numbers 22 and up, such that I dont know of any dramatic structural failures in those. I used mine (USA 22) pretty hard and I saw the Newport fleet out in some extreme conditions and we all came home under our own power.

Now an F18 is 180kg limit, so if you start in the 135kg range with a well-built boat and add almost 50kg's to it (thats 100 f***fing pounds) I bet you will get a stiff, well built platform. You can add a sh**load of reinforcement when you have 100lbs to play with. And the look of the hulls is that they didnt double the volume as compared to the HT, if I had to guess its 20-30% more volume.

Lets look at the new F18 shape, it looks like it has more freeboard than the HT and more volume in the stern (all good stuff so far) and it has the same sort of bows that the HT had, (also good)

Now if Bimare can design a kickup rudder, and make the boards and rudders solid instead of hollow I think it will be a winner.