+1

Thanks Wouter.

The price of the carbon boards is a bit artificial at the moment, the more manufacturers that get involved the cheaper they will become.

My worry about limiting the aspect ratio to less than 5 is that there is a fair bit of foil design going on at the moment and new foil shapes are appearing that give good handling with minimum drag at high aspect ratios. If we limit the aspect ratio, will we miss out on the benefits of these new foil shapes and become slower boats in comparison to the F18's etc.

The other factor is the SCHRS and Texel handicapping systems are very aware of the advantages of high aspect boards and steadily increasing the handicap attributed to the boards, very soon they will penalise these boards and we will all back to square one.

Another problem will be if the Viper is selected for the Olympics and goes immediately to longer high aspect boards ( they after all will be sailed by some of the worlds best ) then we immediately exclude them from the F16 class, I for one would love to at some stage compete against these guys just to learn how good you have to be.

I'm not sure it is a problem yet and think we could perhaps let things lie for a year or two.

Width 0.175mm?? Are you going supersonic

Amateur contests are best for amateurs.

I'm thinking thats supposed to be 17.5mm. Crazy kids, and your silly french measuring systems.

I'm game for supersonic, though I think the winds would be a bit hairy.

I'm probably going to expose my ignorance here, but why not just put a hard limit on maximum draft? I mean, we have a limit on maximum length, maximum width, and maximum mast height so why not? That way designers can use any aspect ratio they want.

wetted length is basically the same as draft.

Your idea is the same as mine. I didn't propose any rule on aspect ratio although a limit on that is somewhat implied.