After having raced the Stealth F16 in several day/heats I feel that no boat without T-foil rudders can feel as rock solid as the Stealth F16. You really can just ram the boat downwind and do your thing on the trampoline, the bows will simply not dig in no matter what. I don't know about the payback though (loss in speed ?) but I much rather loose some speed momentarily then risk a deep dive with possibly a capsize. I remember that during the race we eventually wouldn't even pay attention to the bow anymore. We would just round the bouy, get of the trapeze dive forward and start pulling the kite. This in itself is racing advantage in my book. On my Taipan we need to time the bear away and following actions with the movement of the bow section.
I'm absolutely convinced that the T-foil rudders are the reason for the solid feel of the Stealth. Besides John this is easy to test really. Just lend yourself a couple of daggerbaords of a fellow Stealth owners and slide this in your rudder stocks instead of the T-foil ones.
Wouter
I can tell you that we extensively tested these rudders, we had the prototypes for over a year before we built a mould, and we tried them in 2 boat tuning runs against identical boats with non-t-foil rudders.
In light winds and medium winds on flat water we could see no difference in speed between the 2 set-ups, changing crews every few runs.
As soon as there was any waves, even in light winds the t-foils would start to pull away, consistantly.
As the wind increased the t-foil boat got quicker downwind regardless of waves, upwind the closer the chop the quicker the t-foils were, their upwind speed was related to nastiness of chop not wind strength.
