Anyone know what happened to some canters, foilers and Quants in the Bol d'Or??

EDIT - I was going to take out the reference to the Quants in the thread title but the edit function doesn't seem to work.



I was just looking up the results of the Bol d'Or and saw some interesting results. One of the Quant 30s did well, but two out of the three Quants in the race finished back around with the Farr 25. Anyone know what happened??

It was also interesting to see the foiling beachcats performing poorly. None of them seem to have got into the placings in their class, and three of them (Flying Phantom and two Nacra 20 FCSs) were back in the 180-214 th place, beaten across the line by boats like Surprises, which are similar to J/24s.

The Sk2 canter had a shocker, capsizing and having to have a crew taken off because of hypothermia, before dragging in behind the last of the similar-sized non-canting Speedfeet 18s as well as boats like the Reve de Mere, a heavy 24 foot offshore racing quarter tonner from 1972. Incidentally the best Speedfeet did brilliantly, finishing within about 40 minutes of a couple of the Quants, beating several foiling beachcats (Nacras, Flying Phantoms) across the line, and finishing five hours ahead of the similar-sized canter. Somehow she was beaten on handicap by the longer and newer J/70 which finished behind!

The Diam 24s did poorly - the great Bernard Stamm brought his in just ahead of the tiny Speed Feet 18, and the last of them wasn't far ahead of a Beneteau 211!

It was interesting to see the Libera Rafica win mono line honours (yet again) two hours in front of the much newer canting Psaros 40s. I think she was the boat that won the mono line honours at the Centromiglia once again - not bad for a 1992 boat.

On corrected time, the three Diam 24s took the last three places in class; the five foiling beachcats took the last five places in class; the canter fourth last in class, one of the Quants last in class.

Oh, and there were over 100 Surprises (sort of like J/24s) racing, forming a quarter of the fleet. What's going to happen to such boats, since if we believe what some people are telling us, they have no future?

 

You've got me wondering what happened.

stories here

http://www.boldormirabaud.ch/fr-ch/actualites

 

Not being all that familiar with racing, I'll risk coming off as a total ***.

But one thing I noticed that these boats seemed to be mostly small ones in the 20-24 ft range.

I'll assume they also had crews of 3-5 people, on the mono's at least.

With boats of this size, weighing in at maybe 2400 to say 3500 lbs, the crew weight is a major portion of the boats over all weight, especially if you can put most of that crew out on the rail.

I know the J24, at least, can readily plane with sufficient rail meat, so the smaller size of the boat is not as much of a handicap as some might think.

Add to that, ths rail meat can be quickly redeployed, when changing tacks, maybe quicker than the canting keel boats can re- cant their ballast keels.

As for the quant foil boats, much of their advantage can also be erased by boats with simple rail meat, on boats of this size. Part of the reason for this is the foil has to be re-deployed with every tack, And this takes time.

Now if these boats had all been single handed, the race results may have been somewhat different.

If the boat had all been larger, say an average of 35 ft, the results would have been different then too.

This is because, even if you increase the crew size in proportion to the increase in boat length, you still don't get any where near the sail carrying power you had with the shorter boats. The reason for this is the longer boat is likely to weigh in at roughtly three times as much as the shorter boat, but its rail meat is only going to be 1.5 times as much.

 

It could have been tacking speed that was the issue, which would be significant because there may be less short tacking on the Bol d'Or than on most other racecourses.

It is interesting seeing some of the more extreme boats struggle in the very fluky stuff where the older-style Assos etc just slide on through.

 

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The "Quant foil boats" you refer to were foil assist("normal" DSS), not the newer Quant 23 full flying foiler. I haven't heard the full story yet but the 28 was quite fast in many past races.
For the 28 it takes about one minute or less to redeploy the foil.The thirty uses two independent foils which can be left out in conditions where frequent gybing would occur. And depending on the wind these foils might not even be used at all or just not used upwind.
Because of the RM provided by the foils these boats have more SA than they would have otherwise. That works to their advantage both when the foils are used and in light air when they aren't used.