Is level racing possible with handicaps?

Yacht designer and past Seahorse magazine editor Julian Everitt shares a complex topic in this Facebook post about rating rules and racing:

Could Ton Cup style level racing provide a resurgence in grand prix top class offshore racing from Minis to Maxis? A top flight offshore competitor asks, “Is IRC or ORC up to the task?”

The ‘almost-level’ handicap inshore One Ton of today, fought out in IRC rule Fast 40s, has not proven to have much growth potential. So here is the question from a long-term offshore racing owner, skipper and RORC member:

“Once again, ORC seem to be creating tools and interest, with its SPEED GUIDES, that our IRC cannot. Love or hate ORC, their marketing and voice is heard above IRC. As Rear Commodore of the RORC 2016-2019, I tried to action change to the way the rule was marketed and communicated to little effect.

“The main step we made was to wrestle control away from the French office but even that was a financial fudge! So, as with the latest bulletin, the ORC have more interesting tools and can therefore potentially engage better with the owner base with much more to offer in regard to comparative performance information.

“I would be interested to know what you think about what the strategy should, or could be, for the future in regard to the use of IRC or ORC. Or are we destined to a future of sailing one designs or classics!?”

ANSWER:
I think the ORC model is fundamentally more interesting because it is open. They actually have something they can promote with comparison tools – either boat against boat or as with the so-called speed guide – a way of measuring your ability to sail your own boat against its theoretical performance.

IRC, on the other hand doesn’t have much that it can promote due to its antiquated secrecy rules. The IRC is very good at patting itself on the back saying how successful it is, but at the end of the day, that isn’t actually that interesting.

The ORC rule based, as it is, on supposedly accurate scientific performance data, should be wiping the floor with IRC in terms of popularity as both a club level cruiser racer handicap rule and a full-on grand prix rating system – but it’s not.

So, you have to ask yourself why not? Why wasn’t the established offshore rating rule body able to make a seamless change from IOR to IMS and then to the ORC Rule? Well, it would seem that despite the vastly greater PR value inherent in the scientific solution to offshore sailboat handicapping, the general sailing public still prefer the haphazard linear measurement system enshrined in IRC.

But to add to the problem of which solution is inherently more saleable to the racing boat owners, we have gigantic anomalies in both rules. They both pride themselves, in their sales pitches, that their respective formulas can measure any kind of monohull sailing boat. With the VPP based ORC this would seem, on the face of it, to be an honest and achievable goal and one that is open to scrutiny. However, the reality though is very different.

The rule is intensely type forming which seems to be a contradiction of the very cornerstone of the rule, that is supposed to allow it to accurately measure actual performance differences in hull forms and rig configurations. Why therefore is there a type formed solution? It makes no sense whatsoever.

If the formulas are working properly, then it shouldn’t matter at all what displacement you choose, how much beam, how much sail area, how much keel depth, or even underbody configuration. Anything should be rated with a ‘fair’ handicap based on its performance potential – even a long-keeled boat.

Indeed, if the VPPs worked at all, you could have a hugely disparate fleet racing as close as a bunch of One Designs. But two elements work against the popularity of ORC:
1) The perceived complexity.
2) The total failure to produce a product that actually does what it says on the can.

IRC isn’t much better except the rule helps demonstrate that human nature quite likes the random elements of a linear measurement system together with a big dollop of empirical judgement. The secrecy element is just paranoia. To be frightened by the cost effects of unleashing untold development of new boats by hungry designers – well that horse has already bolted in an undignified rush to obtain ‘optimized’ rating certificates. (Something which, incidentally, is effectively banned by the rules own Rule 2.5 – but who seems to care?)

The owners are simply paying big bucks for the designers to ‘guess’ and then get their interpretation of an optimum ratified by a secret formula. It’s crazy and wholly unnecessary. If IRC was actually braver in using its fudge factors, it could control unseaworthy developments very easily.

But just as with ORC, there is a lie at the core of IRC. It again, like ORC, purports to be able to measure almost anything you throw at it, which kind of implies that a fair rating will be produced for whatever hull form, rig configuration that comes along. But this is clearly not true and for reasons that are mystifying IRC, produces intensely type formed, optimized yachts.

Its real value should be returned to its roots. A rule that is very good at rating a mixed fleet, it undoubtedly is, but as a rule for rating development boats, it is completely useless except to those looking through the narrow prism of fashion.

Neither of these rules are effective at producing level rating classes. The very kind of racing that was so popular under IOR and which just about everybody craves today: top level racing without handicap.