When dissimilar boats meet

by Craig Leweck, Scuttlebutt Sailing News
When I finished second to Steve Grillon in the 1994 Melges 24 US Nationals, I was pissed. Still am. Grillon was a big deal in Southern California and beyond, and had the sort of personality that makes the sport fun… and fun to beat.

A recent Scuttlebutt report highlighted how in handicap racing, each boat is rated based on completing the same course distance, but design variables for each boat assure that’s not possible. Never short for words, Grillon shares his view on the issue:

I do not see the point of this argument about individual course length. Are you trying to add a new unknown variable to the complexity of handicap racing? The fundamental issue with handicap racing is the inability of an arbitrary system like PHRF to rate dissimilar, one-dimensional boats.

Whiners with freak boats want credit for their lack of sailing skills and inability to get off the start-line. Those same people refuse to race one design or measured handicap classes, claiming it is hard to understand or too competitive to have fun.

In PHRF, the fleet is fractured between boats rating well for buoy races and those rating well for downwind races, so participation is down across the board.

ORC and ORR do the best job at attempting to rate each boats potential at many angles and velocities, but it is still not perfect. Race course conditions are the impossible thing to handicap and both Time-on-Time and Time-on-Distance create issues.

ToD can give a huge advantage to fast boats in a dying breeze and overnight races with long hours of zero breeze, and then building breeze the next day for late finishers favors the slower, lowest rated boats in ToT handicapping.

Dying participation is the disease of sailing. PHRF is the easiest and cheapest way for different boats to participate, and it is the worst system. Maybe the best handicap method is to average the ToT and ToD allowances or just combine them. This will blend the two to attempt to identify the team that sailed to the highest potential.

Another solution is for US Sailing to aggressively re-assign ratings to every boat sailing and make racing better. They could combine the known factors from sister-ships in ORR and ORC and re-rate every boat for buoy and random leg racing to make the racing more representative of the performance of the hulls.

ToT is far better for short races with the same breeze across the entire course, but difficult for the math-challenged to understand.