You lost your credibility when you stated that PHRF works. PHRF is the most inconsistent system out there.

The same boat rates differently region to region - even one-design boats like M24's or J22's.

There is no formula used to derive the rating - it's a guestimation by committee on how that boat will compete within a given fleet.

A boat that is perceived to win too often will have their rating lowered.

A boat that doesn't win will typically have their rating raised.

Rule Beater???

Mike... that is a red herring.... Beach cats in the US used handicap racing with a measurement rule...aka.. NAMSA for years prior to USPN... it used Herb Malm's proprietary measurement rule to generate the table and then he stoked it using data.

No rule beaters were designed!

Texel has been widely used for many a year... Which boat was designed to be a rule beater?

Nobody has ever pressed the charge that XXX is a measurement rule beater under Texel or SCHRS and blah blah designed it to be so!

But... the point is that Portsmouth is broken... we don't have the racing scene to generate high quality data....So, it now must function like a PHRF system.... Note the Nacra F20 rating was set by Texel/SCHRS for US portsmouth by the PHRF like committe.

Do you think the racing community is well served with a broken PN system that must act like a PHRF committee to maintain a reasonable ratings table?

Make a case for the status quo.... and the most recent PN table (grin)

Can you give an example of one of those "rule-beaters"?

Inadvertently, the F16 was a rule beater when it first arrived.

Also, the reason why none have been designed under PN is because the mechanism for the rating to change over time is there. Why build a $30k one-off catamaran that will have one season of a gift rating before its number changes.

Keep tilting at windmills Mark. Its fun to watch.

Mike,

What weakness are you talking about? The rule and calculations are public; you can download the calculator here: http://www.schrs.com/exe/SCHRSCalc2009.exe

SCHRS has been around a while; I see no rule beaters being designed!!!!

SCHRS rates the parts of the boat that make it go faster or slower. Have a play with the calculator and see what you can come up with!

New developments are rated as they become effective.

Right.... How does this differ from How the USPN must operate today.

the F16 rating ...had to be adjusted...
The Supercat 20 rating... had to be adjusted.
The CFR 20 rating ... had to be adjusted.

Like it or not... without a lot of high quality data... the USPN system is simply a national PHRF like system.

In defense of PHRF... an awful lot of sailors spent a ton of money racing in Key West for essentially PHRF nationals under PHRF handicaps for many years. Serious people work hard at generating fair ratings and the owners clearly don't think it's a waste of time. Local PHRF ratings are a function of the American spirit of ... if it's local... it must be better because its under our local control. Sounds like your PHRF board has issues.

The solution is to adopt SCHRS or TEXEL... Several of the US distance races already have!

You avoid any perception that the rating is bogus or set by politics with a measurement system.

I don't race under SCHRS or Texel and don't understand it's weakness's/strengths.

An example of a weekness would be that the F18 has consistently become faster since it's introduction. However the measurements have not changed. Better sail cut/ foil design/ balance / ....

I know the weakness's in Portsmouth. I race under it. And yes there are weakness's.

However I think that we could be trading one system with weakness that can be adjusted to another system.

I'm not totally against it. I just think it needs to be looked at very seriously and figure out if it improves results or might be actually worst.

And yes, Given a set of rules, A boat can be designed to "beat" the system. I'm not saying it's been done. But someone perhaps hasn't put the time into it to make that happen. Leave it to a bunch of yanks to screw up a good system.

Thanks for taking the time to submit a solution for a better alternative than the PN system. The statistician in me hates to see the PN be dissolved however it is only as good as the data collected. The statistical concept is that a solid number can be derived with enough "observations" such that the "outliers" would not be significant in the final number. It would be a real and best measurement but it requires MANY observations. In reality, those days do not exist. We cannot collect enough observations to flush out the crew skill factor let alone obscure match ups. Consequently, it is time to call it for what it is and accept a mathmatical/engineering model such as Texel or SCHRS to calculate handicaps. Ultimately, if you are really committed to a fair system; go One Design or SMOD. Even then there are boat & sail factors beyond skill that can impact your results but at least they are minimized.

Thats is not true actually.
The Texel Rating has been adapted over the years to reflect changes in boat and rig design trends.

This brought the F18 number down from 102 a few years ago to 100 now, and the A's and F16 rating has gone up 1 and 2.

So you would expect Portsmouth to take this into account! The ratings should get faster!

So from 2005 to 2010
A period where you saw the builders evolve from:
Tiger to Tiger upgrades to Wildcat
Nacra F18 to Nacra Infusion
Cap 1 to Cap 2

the USPN rating
2010
62.4 65.4 63.9 61.3 59.5

2008
62.4 65.4 63.9 61.3 59.5

2006
62.4 65.4 63.9 61.3 59.5


2005
62.6 66.1 64.4 61.5 59.5


Hmm... that would be a change in DPN rating of .2!

Bottom Line.... Either you assume that PN is working and the data don't support... "F18's are faster"... or you say... well we just don't have ANY data of any kind! (the basic underlying problem with Portsmouth and the major reason that it is broken).

A larger point about accuracy of ratings.... the intrinsic noise of a sailboat race means that you just can't resolve this perceived increase in speed in the ratings tables.

You are asking for a level of resolution that the game of handicap sailboat racing can't deliver.

the guy on the helm is the biggest factor. Struble races a vintage Flyer 1 in the US worlds and is in the top 10 until a breakdown.... wins 2010 NA's on current ride... Is it Struble or the boat.... (It's Struble)

This years Europeans... an Aussie young sailor on a Flyer I with high aspect boards is at the top of the fleet.

In both cases... the variance due to boat development is much much smaller then the other factors in a sailboat race ... (See my Farr 40 example)

When the top sailors upgrade their equipment.... you underestimate their skill and over rate the boat....

For this debate. Portsmouth can't resolve this "F18's are faster notion" Measurement ratings recognize the resolution limits of handicap racing and do not try to refine their formula to get another decimal place... it's a waste of time.

One Design Racing will have more "real" resolution then handicap racing but this is not the issue.

The issue is... Which handicap system has complete integrity and fairly rates the boats in a timely and transparent manner.

"Inadvertently, the F16 was a rule beater when it first arrived."

You wanna 'splain that?

Pete, this has been a hotly debated issue for years. You know how this would end up... someone will give their opinion on the initial F16 rating, you'll say bullsh!t and then it's on. Isn't the sh!t fight over which rating system we should use enough?

Mike

F18 rating under schrs was 1.01 (2 decimal places)

when we changed the system to 3 dp we also changed the "fulcrum" boat - that is the boat all other boats are calcualted against to be the F18; the rating also becamse 1.005.

In the future (well my plan was when I was chair) was that the F18 rating will NEVER change; all boats will move around this boat as the formula is changed as developments happen.

The reason we chose the F18 was because it was sailed most widely world wide and so logic dictates using it as the boat we measure all other boats against.

The F18 is currently sailed by the best sailors and so it will show, to the best practical way, how a well sailed boat will perform and thus define the rating base. There are lots of boats of different designs that all measure the same under SCHRS (we assume maximum efficiency plates). These boats have their goot points (for example Shockwave down wind; Wildcat is good upwind; but under SCHRS it averages out as differing boats win the big regattas).

If the top competitors in the N20 / I20, F18 and F16 (and pick as many as you like) all sailed the same courses at the same event; I would expect the F18 to win as the World champ will be of higher quality.

If you could clone Gashby and Bundy to sail all the boats over a spread of conditions and courses you would get draws.

The point was taken out of context. The F16 was NOT a Texel or SCHRS rule beater.

PN missed with its opening number and once there were some races (data) the PN was promptly lowered. It is now a function of the F18 rating less .6 across the board which I do not necessarily agree with at the higher wind scales. You would think that it should be a proportion relative to the base rating and not an absolute & constant reduction relative to higher wind ratings. I'm splitting hairs now.

Yeh. Why don't you tell Tad that.

The F16s are always wrong, everyone else is always right. What a load of crap!

If we were rating the boats, instead of the boats performance a lot of this nonsense would never come up.

If a car is light weight and has a lot of horsepower, it is assumed it will be fast. The F16 should have been rated higher from the beginning. Instead the boat and the class are criticized for faults belonging to the rating system.

It was the F16 class that stepped up and asked that the boat be rated appropriately. We NEVER tried to game the system!

I never said you did.

When the F16 first came out, there was something about its design that clearly made it faster than what it was rated as initially measured by PN.

Thats why I said "Inadvertently". Nobody did it on purpose I believe, it just happened like that. When Wooter actually lobbied to get the rating "fixed" and closer to the F18 rating where it belonged, I actually agreed with him on something.

But Ding is right, rehashing history about the F16 rating really doesn't help this argument out at all. Whether SCHRS or Texel would have kept the problem from happening, I don't know. I tell you what though, I get a good belly laugh out of every post Mark makes about it though.

Save it for SA. At least Mark is trying to get the system fixed, has stepped up, and prepared a submission recognizing that there are better alternatives to PN. You have to know Mark to understand his passion for debate.

100% agree there. Mark and I have had our very heated disagreements on this issue but there is no denying his passion and I give him huge kudo's for taking this on. Damnit! Am I in the Mark camp again! F@#$ ME!

Thank you to Mark for volunteering,

S-->

As long as the person can use a tape measure, a set of scales and punch some numbers into a PC you can measure and calc a rating using SCHRS or Texel.

Of course it would not have happend under SCHRS or Texel.