Well, the advice is to stay out of F20 racing for now and first see where the class is going. It is on a delicate balancing act as a direct result of Nacra deciding to pull out of the F20 class. Right now it can go either way; meaning one possible course is dying.

A short while ago Nacra decided to place their Inter-20 out of the F20 ruleset by entlarging the mainsail to US specs. The other factors were the F18 Worlds being held in NL in 2005 and the fact that F18 is a much stronger class with progressingly faster boats while the F20 is somewhat stationary. It is my opinion that the F20 class has reached negative critical mass about 6 to 12 months ago. This means that they are into a selfpropelling decline.

As stated above one of the factors was the Dutch F18 worlds. This saw an important group of F20 sailors move to the F18 class; the newer F18 designs also carry weight better so now that they are there they are not expected to move back to the F20 again. The development in the F18 class was making the gap between F20 and F18 smaller and smaller performancewise. In addition the US sailor prevent consilidation of the F20 class by refusing to play by the F20 rules, in effect the F20 class never made it outside of Europe, or more precise North-West Europe as France never got on the F20 wagon. The nacra builder and importer was then faced with a defacto split situation. They opted for some reason to go onto the offensive (understandable) and force all Inter-20 to a single setup the world over. They gambled on the US I-20 setup and so disgarded the European F20 setup for the non-F20-compliant US I-20 setup. This is pushing another round of Eu I-20 sailors towards the F18 class. At the same time F18 racing is growing in the US, and into a large part out of US I-20 sailors. It is quite possible that the builder/importer decided to gamble on the wrong horse. They rocked the boat with respect to a reasonable well established Eu F20 fleet in favour of a contracting US I-20 fleet.

I personally don't fancy the chances of the new nacra 20 (former US I-20) fleet as a One-design class. I don't think the European sailor is interested in OD classes at this time, in addition the US sailor is leaning more and more towards the (non OD) F18 class. In effect a similar trend.

I'm personally all for allowing classes to develop and upgrade themselfs, however you must time these developments carefully. Now it may have been the case that they saw a serious problem ahead when staying F20 and that breaking out provided better chances, in such a case this move would be smart. Time will tell if it was.

Stay tuned !

Wouter