Dorade Wins Transpac...Twice

I agree with you, fair win, sailed very well. But lets not confuse that with fast boat design.

The late 60's 911 are pretty impressive, especially with some track prep, but stock condition to stock condition, my money would be on 280hp and all wheel drive, but could be close enough to come down to driver. A Porsche 356 on the other hand would get clobbered....

 

I dunno. Did anyone ever race a 911 without prepping it? A prepped 911 is a racing machine. A prepped mid-level Subaru is.... a mid-level Subaru.

I'm arguing that one mostly for fun, though. I don't really have a dog in the fight - especially since we agree that regardless, vintage Porsche's and vintage Sparkman Stephens boats are special. And I once had an old Subaru that carried me and my three-man construction crew safely to and from a winter job for three months, up in the mountains near Big Bear. Wasn't much room for the tools though, after the four of us squeezed in. We had to keep them locked up at the job site.

add: is anyone familiar with the handicapping rules that gave Dorade an advantage over the Transpac 52's on corrected time? Was the difference that Dorade is set up more as a cruiser that also races, rather than as a pure racer? That's a pure guess on my part....

 

No idea, bit I did read somewhere about early 911's beating up on the more modern carreras etc. Seems the advantage of light weight and 30 years of race feedback was hard to beat.

My dad owned a 74 (I think) 911 targa for a few years, maybe not the fastest, but certainly the most fun car I have every driven. Especially the time during my senior year of high school when he let me borrow it for a week so my girlfriend and I could take a week long road trip through the mountains of California. Filled the backseat with camping gear and went everywhere...


At the time I was driving a rather ratty 1972 BMW 3.0cs, probably one of the most beautiful cars that mere mortals can afford. Wish I still had it since prices have gone through the roof the last few years, but sold it to buy my first cruising boat.

Neither boats nor old cars make much sense, so they may as well be beautiful.

 

As has been pointed out, the Transpac is a handicap race...A Westsail 32 has won overall before...<shrug>...It's nice to have a race that's not about what you buy, but how you sail.

 

I really have no idea how handicap ratings are made. Its a black art. I recently did a regatta and a boat 2 meters longer on the waterline and of similar concept as the boat I was sailing, had a lower rating. We gave them time.

As you can guess, handicap would consider waterline lenght, sail area, displacement.

Most sailors prefer to race in boats that are similar or one design.

Handicaps can never account for the weather conditions on the course. A big boat may complete the course in 5 knots of average wind speed. The wind increases after the big boat finishes and the small boat completes the course with an average windspeed of 7 knots.

In a mixed regatta, with many different size and style boats, the boats would be divided into logical classes of similar size and performance .

Winning your class is the goal. The most prestigiuos performance would be the boat who won its class by the largest margin.

First to finish honours always goes to the boat who spent the most money

 

The Transpac is sailed under the ORR rating rule. http://offshore.ussailing.org/ORR.htm This rule is VPP (Velocity Prediction Program) based, and the rule is intended to be "non type forming". That is, in theory they judge all the factors of a boat, (length, weight, sail area, stability, etc) and give that boat a handicap (seconds per mile over the length of the course) against the theoretical "fastest" boat on the course. In this case Ragamuffin 100, look at the results sheet I posted and you'll see her rating is 0. A typical TP52's rating is 97, and that of Dorade is 252.....Dorade rates slow because, compared to current designs, her waterline is short, sail area is small, and she is narrow and heavy.

 

I was looking through my previous posts and came across this thread about Dorade again.
Both Dorade and Stormy Weather are on MarineTraffic now - here are their links.
And both of them were in Cowes (on the Isle of Wight in the UK) last summer taking part in a big Classic Yacht festival there.
Stormy is now back home in the South of France, and Dorade is in Newport.

Dorade :
http://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais...sel:DORADE/_:d45f90a56370089ae0d2d4a25375db3c

Stormy : https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ai...MY WEATHER/_:d45f90a56370089ae0d2d4a25375db3c