Plain and simple BS !

Selftacking fore sails have been on boats as long ago as several hundred years. Only after the introduction of the dominant mono hull rating rule that favour large overlapping foresail did the builders move away from selftackign systems. I have personally sailed on a 1887 pleasure yacht that had a selftacking rail and jib as good as identical in nature as modern systems. That is not an really old sail boat by Dutch standards. With the correction of the mono hull rating rule where the actuall area of the foresail is talking into account do we see the return of boom jibs and selftacking foresails.

In multihull land ; Yardstick initially favoured overlapping jibs as they are marginally faster because alot more sail area goes into the jib and this area is put to use on reaches and broad reaches. Now that the newer designs are much more dominated by measurement systems that look at actual area's and formula class rules that limit area, they selftackers are returning to multihulls. This because the they are about equal on upwind as the slightly bigger overlapping jibs and on the broad reaches the spi takes care of the rest. Of course we don't do much reaching in races anymore. This all has alot more to do with things like rating systems and temporary cultures than discovery of new technology.

With respect to I-20 and Tornado having issues with their jib traveller line. This is just plain BS. They use this line to find the optimal trim for the car for the conditions and before the start and then leave it there between start and finish. It is never adjusted while racing except on SOME distance races where they fine-tune it for a very long reaching leg. This control line must be compared to the line than sets the luff tension of a jib. There is absolutely no need to trim is continiously, let alone from the trapeze. But more strikingly Bill system can certainly not do all this automatically. In fact in some case it does the very opposite of what you actually want. For this very reason straight jib travellers are disgarded by the serious racing crews. This has nothing to do with lack of recognizing auto trimming potential.

To make this all more clear I refer to the example of a nascar car suspension and that of a baha 1000 vehicel. Bill wants us to believe that he can design an identical (and unpowered) system auto adjusts itself to the different
conditions found between the track and the dirt road. One size suits all, right ?

Yeah !

Try and implement a straight rail track, it'll work well enough. But don't kid yourself that is better than what the truly professional guys are using.

Wouter