Hi Wouter

The fundamental issue is the definition of a Class.
Is a Class an organization of sailors who race under a set of equipment rules? OR is a Class a boat configuration.

For the purpose of the USPN, Class is essentially defined as a boat configuration and the convience of labeling for scorekeeping purposes causes new classes to magically appear. In Dart Hawk case... they drop the F18 part of their name and become a seperate Dart Hawk class... not the Dart Hawk F18. Again, this is an inherent property of USPN and now the rating can slide or become more accurate depending on your view of the process and the data. Currently, the Dart Hawk is back to being rated as an F18.

Most of the time these boats disapear from the racing scene and are not raced frequently and so it is usually not much of a problem creating an unfair playing field.

USPN follows the public's definition of a boat class ... It does not control or rigorously define a class or rules for a class for the purpose of the yardstick. The table of classes changes a lot over time. As far as I know, there is no repository of Class Rules, at most Brian Karr tabulated class crew weights for several classes that he could find a few years ago and this table is published. You don't need class rules to get listed in the yardstick


How does Texel or ISAF handle these these kinds of issues.
Do they issue rating certificates to any configuration that shows up for a measurement and then add it to the list? Do you need a minimum number of boats to be measured to get a rating line in ISAF or Texel?