Personally I dont think you'll see a rush to banana boards in the Aclass for 2 reasons.

First, The current boats are pretty highly refined and making a radical change will probably not have the leapfrog effect in performance you would expect. You might see a few examples here and there, but the majority of the A cats wont have radical new boards this season or next. The issue with most types of lifting foil or gybing foil is that it needs to be "tacked" so you need to raise/lower alternative boards on each tack. So, do you lose more ground doing that or not? Remember, Its a one man boat.

Second, from what I've seen the people that make radical modifications to their boats are few, most guys racing A cats have factory boats. The number of home built competitive A's is low compared to the whole that races. So you've got mostly guys buying boats instead of building them, and the guy that just bought a new A2 doesnt have the desiire, skills,tools, etc to go hacking up a new A2 or XJ.


You might see Steve Clark experimenting with something, he's the one guy I would expect to show up right away with something new. But I've spoken to him about foils on cats and when we talked about it last year, he wasnt convinced. Its too bad he doesnt participate here.

I agree with Liuz, it's still vague in my opinion what the diagram is actually saying. It seems like its more like a directional statement saying you can do anything you want within the max beam.