>>Hey hey!! Im sorry to keep on troubling you will all the f16 questions hahaha, but I still have 1 or 2 left.
No problem.
>>As I understand one of the goals of the F16 class is to be able to race on elapsed time agaisnt A-cats and F18. My doubt is, when racing agaisnt F-18, will I need to have a crew and race sloop or can I still race solo and cat-rigged agaisnt the F-18?
You should be able to race against F18's in both modes. The ratings assigned to F18 under Texel-ISAF are 102-101 ; The rating of F16 doublehanded are Texel-ISAF = 102-101; F16 solo setup Texel -ISAF = 101-0.98
I think Texel is the better system when rating the solo setup and but no matter at which rating system you look the solo version of the F16 is rated faster on handicap than the F18's.
Now I, and many others, think ISAF and Texel to be to optimistic with regard to solo setups. Experience in several classes that use the same setup for doublehanded and singlehanded sailing put the sloop ahead of the cat-rigged setup and not the other way around as the ratings systems predict. The error is about 1-3 %. We allowed the singlehanded setups to be a little faster on paper(handicap) to compensate for this. We feel the 2 modes are pretty equal now and both of them are at the F18 performance. The rest is crew skill. If anything the rating system agree with us or think we are too conservative in our performance description.
One thing about the solo F16 setup is that conditions impact differently on a solo sailor. After all you can only put one guy in the trapeze and only have one pair of hands and eyes that will need to do all the tasks that would normally be done by two. So the similarity in performance between the doublehanded F18 and a singlehanded F16 may be (very) close but less than the similarity between teh doublehanded setups of both makes.
One thing is certain the solo F16 comes closest to F18 than all other makes of solo boats , mainly because of the spinnaker. An A-cat is fast but will loose out to the spinnaker everytime.
Wouter
