slowboat said...djdojo said...
I've added the equipment innovations that were involved in each.
1982 Pascal Maka 27.82 (fully battened sail, board designed for speed, not just a wave sinker)
1983 Fred Haywood 30.82 (wing mast)
1986 Pascal Maka 38.68 (camber inducers)
1988 Erik Beale 40.30 (higher aspect non-dolphin fin)
1993 Thierry Bielak 45.34 (monofilm sail, carbon mast)
2004 Finian Maynard 46.82 (carbon boom)
2008 Antoine Albeau 49.09
Not wanting to blow your argument, but I'm not sure the items you list next to each of these specific speed milestones had a significant impact on those results.
Wing mast- helped or hindered? We'll never know... Looked really stiff to me, and where did we go from there? Back to round masts. I heard the wind was nuking that day...
Camber inducers- nice to use for racing as it keeps the sail cambered without load. Its not essential for speed but in most cases it does help.
Fins- if you havent noticed the raked back fins are working great. The transition to more refined foil designs happened a few years earlier than '88. But there were no breakthroughs in fin design at that time. I think the bigger contributor to Erik's record was the fact he did it in the canal soon after it was built (THE record machine as proven since) during a private attempt in great conditions.
Monofilm? It was used extensively from the late 80's. There was plenty of better material around but it was (is) a lot more expensive. It may have been revolutionary from a performance/cost ratio for production, but not overall performance.
I set one of my fastest ever sessions (and fastest at the time) on an Aluminium boom (48kts max). Short booms are always pretty stiff so being carbon didnt make a difference.
Anyway the point of elaborating on your list, is that what we used to believe was making a difference can now be proven quite easily with the massive global database of measurements from GPS that we can all access. Although there havent been any crazy material innovations, the application of those materials has definitely improved the sport.
The biggest improvement since the early-mid '90s was the introduction of high pressure batten systems. Then with the reintroduction of the wider sleeves, combined with the higher batten pressure. This increased the profile stability of the sails enormously. The batten system used in production race sails is pretty sweet now. Where to next? Where are the problems in the rig? That depends on how you tune it and for what conditions.
Wider luff sleeves, deeper profiles, more even skin tension further back in the sail, and effective dynamic twist has allowed us to be more balanced more of the time. The stability allows us to fully load the sail more of the time without suddenly changing the load on the board and fin as we sail into a gust or lull, allowing us to accelerate harder, and for longer.
The boards have evolved slightly, but more in response to changes in sail handling. Fins have improved in general, due mostly to market demand for quality in this area. With the other components becoming more balanced, the fin is more important than before- its no longer the "least of the unsolved problems". But there were a lot of really nice fins made from the late '80s... also a lot of really bad ones
I think the biggest reason people are going faster is interest in speed sailing due to the availability of GPS to objectively and conveniently measure performance. Thats new...
wingssails
> 9 months ago, 6 Aug 2011
#gallery
