I fully agree with what Matt said. But try to make the boat easier to sail correctly all the time, that is, make the control lines easily adjustable, that will lead to more speed.

There have only been some small advances in hull speed, mostly from reducing overall weight by reducing weight in the hulls, masts and sail material.

Then there is sail shape, like the square top mains, self tacking jibs (may not actually add sail power but are faster to tack, allowing the crew to get out on the wire a second sooner, wich makes the boat a tiney bit faster). But you need only look at the Tornado to see that rig improvments have gained more speed than hull shapes in the past 20 years. A "fast" upwind hull may be slow downwind, so that is the trade off you have to make.

I think the "Next Big Thing" in terms of actual speed improvements will be development of foils. Look at the Moth class. If they can do it on a skinny mono, we should be able to figure a way to make it work on a cat. All you really have to do is take two Moths, remove the side wings and connect them with a couple 8 foot carbon beams, move the mast to the middle of the forward beam and voila, you have a foiling cat!

Or...maybe we can talk Matt into mounting a couple of daggerboard trunks at an angle beneath the forward and read beams of a couple of Blade hulls, slide in some longer boards (steal some Inter 20 boards) and see what happens! <img src="http://www.catsailor.com/forums/images/graemlins/shocked.gif" alt="" />

I volunteer to be the Test Pilot. (or crash test dummy)