scott.projectsomewhere

So I might’ve been a bit blunt in yesterday’s evaulation of the 49er rig. I could probably have been more balanced in my post, but with everything on this blog, the opinions I post (not my commenters) are mine alone and hopefully they’re sometimes objective.

Anyway, by all means the new rig is very nice. Southern have done an incredible job in the manufacture and finish. It is light and stiff and looks beautiful.

But out of the box it wasn’t as quick as old rigs, which in themselves weren’t quick against other high-end old rigs.

The new rig was quick when the breeze went soft, and the crews on the old rigs needed to bend and over-compensate for their heavy/soft masts. The new one could hold power longer and quickly gained in those lulls.

When the crews could stretch out, the old rigs were a touch quicker.

In 20+ knots, who knows.

I think the new rig will get faster and faster as teams work out how to tune in properly. We rapidly improved it over a few days with more and more primary tension and less and less D1s. The mast also seemed to bend quite a lot at the gooseneck with only moderate tension and no main or vang, which probably pointed to a setup problem in the heel. Taking up the bend so low probably meant the bend wasn’t going higher up the rig enough. Again more tuning would sort that.

So while these opinions are mine, I wasn’t alone in holding them. Several extremely technical and extremely talented sailors also voiced the same concerns.

Where to from here?

I would look at the mainsail, not the mast. That’s where the easy gains can be made.

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Also worth keeping an eye on would be the flatter top spreader angles for the straighter mast, which puts the spreader tips closer to the spinnaker leech. We lost 1 spinnaker there through course of the week.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 4th, 2008 at 10:04 am and is filed under 49er. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.