Foiling 18 II

Since the advent of Mirabaud there has been much development. This past weekend Thomas Jundt raced his Foiling 18 against "normal" 18's: here is what he just said on SA:

"Hi Doug,

I can give you some information about this venue.

The European Championship is actually taking place in SixFour, Southern France at a wind surf spot called Brutal Beach.

We participated only Saturday (training) and Sunday (2 races) and are now back home (8 hours drive all night) the Championship will last the whole week.

Unfortunately we had very light wind conditions (no brutal beach !), very hot weather, humidity and feable thermal winds the after-noon only

Taking into acount the fact that the class association had allowed us to compete but in a seperate class (sic !)we decided not to interfere too much with the racing,
so we started late crossed on port behind the fleet and just followed to check our speed.

We are very happy with over all performance when flying with minimum 2 crew fully trapezing which was the case in the first race :
- upwind same height and faster, downwind faster and deeper
- our lack of handling training made us hook the code zero to a spreader during the second run which busted the race for us.

In none flying conditions we are slower (the second race) :
- a bit slower upwind, the additionnal drag of the foils seams not to be too penalizing
- but much slower downwind, our head sail was a 20 sqm code 0, way not enough against the 65 sqm assymetrics


My conclusion :
- dispite the fact that our boat weighs 220 kg compared to the newest ones at 155 kg (class rule minimun since 2005) we are competitif when foiling (wind at least 10 knots)
- the additionnal drag of the foils seem to be acceptable when non flying
- in non foiling conditions downwind without the big assymetric you're dead
- a new boat 155 kg, with foils in the hands of a trained crew would beat everybody by a big margin in most conditions
- unfortunately, foilers seem not to be welcome in the class

Regards
Thomas


PS : we will continue to developp the skeleton boat :


http://fr.youtube.com/watch?v=LT174ppfbUM

 

And that makes perfect sense, doesn't it? One look at the cars that race at LeMans shows you that while there are differently horsepowered cars all racing at the same time, they are definitively classed as very different entries.

I don't see any reason why the foilers of a similar type of boat as the non-foilers would not be allowed to race, but they certainly should not be categorized or scored with the other class for placings.

The whole, foiling thing is still much too early in development to have any kind of well-established take on how they might be handicapped, so the separation of class seems to be the best way to make this work.

Chris

 

I guess the Moth class is an example of how foilers and non foilers could co-exist in the same class.

 

Foilers seem not welcome?

Maybe its because they aren't allowed under the rules of the "normal" 18 rules if I recall correctly....