From Charlie's blog...

Qingdao, China - August 13, 2008 - The first race day for the Tornado Class in the Olympic Games is almost upon us. Tomorrow we sail a practice race and then on Friday we line up on Course A, the inshore race course right off the harbour breakwater and spectator grandstand, for the start of Race One. Two races are scheduled.

For everyone who wants to see Tornado Racing on television, the races on Friday will be your only opportunity before the Medal Race at the end of the series. NBC-TV will feature our racing live in a two-hour web-TV segment between 1:00 am and 3:00 am Eastern on Friday morning at http://www.nbcolympics.com/sailing/index.html. After that the footage will be archived and available for play-on-demand.

We completed our boat and sail measurements over the last couple of days, including the successful measuring in of our radical Chupacabra Code Zero gennaker. With the sail measured in and officially accepted, the only remaining decision was whether to employ it or stick with a standard gennaker during the series. We can’t have both. It was a tough and risky call. We know the sail will power us up in really light conditions going to windward, but in any breeze over 11 knots we’ll only be able to use it downwind and we’ll risk being outgunned by boats with standard gennakers. After carefully weighing the odds, we decided to press ahead and use it.

This versatile undersized gennaker which allows us to power to windward through a chop in really light airs has been considered by several teams since our development work became public about five weeks ago. We know for sure that our Dutch training partners Mitch Booth and Pim Nieuwenhuis have elected to go with a similar sail. We don’t know about others.

The sail has attracted a great deal of media attention and even questions about its legality. Everyone has an opinion but the simple truth is we have tweaked our sails for light air. In the Tornado Class every team has worked exceptionally hard to gain an edge and optimize every facet of their boat, rig and sails. Everyone has made their own choices on sail materials and special sail designs and shapes for the expected conditions. We did the same as everyone else, except that we designed and built a smaller sail that would be more adaptable in the four to eight knot wind range that we expect to predominate in the coming days.


Read more at Johnny and Charlie's blog at www.t-squaredracing.com

Get 'em, boys. <img src="http://www.catsailor.com/forums/images/graemlins/wink.gif" alt="" />