It is winter here so the club racing is treated more as "tuning" rather than “all out" competition, and the F18 skipper that sailed those races, although not in the "top ten" F18 sailors, does have many years of experience and sailed in multitudes of national events (always been a Hobie man) as well as at least two of the most recent Tiger worlds, so we are not looking at our results as "definitive", but yes, it was very interesting that the downwind performance/boat speed, of the F14 was greater than that of the Tigers on every downwind leg (and believe me he was trying , no 18’ sailor wants to be passed by ANY 14’ ever). The conditions were light with the wind only varying between 5 to 6 knots at the start of the first race ranging up to 8 to 9 knots throughout the course of the day, the water surface was smooth (no white caps) but with a relatively amount of undulations (lumpy) on the surface which caused a reasonable amount of "pitching" to all classes sailing. At the start of the racing I had anticipated that under these conditions, (which normally suits F18’s over F14’s) the advantages of the Tiger with it’s far greater sail area and longer waterline length, would let it simply “walk away” on every leg, but this didn’t eventuate, not just on one downwind, but consistently on every one. As I say it is interesting, but we will see what happens over a wider range of conditions and many more races before making any “claims”.
No there is no secret or “black art” about the T foil system, ours is very similar to the first stocks that were on the Stealth, but our T foils have parallel leading and trailing edges (instead of the Stealth’s curved ones) apart from that there seems to be very little other variation that you can incorporate in the design of rudder T foils. It is very simple and straight forward making and attaching a T foil system, and basically you just take your “normal” rudder system off the cat and hang the T foil one on in their place then go sailing as per normal. The foils just look after themselves and you steer just like you always have but instead of the bow and stern rising and falling in opposite directions with the boat movement through the water, the hulls just go up and down vertically with the decks staying level instead of “pitching”. Great feeling though.