This page is under construction…
Broadcast Feature
Fleet 27 Season (work in progress)
RaceQs is a FREE race tracking app for your phone. Load it on your iPhone or Android phone and turn it on while you are racing. You can even set it up to automatically turn on ten minutes before the 1st warning signal. The app tracks your position every second. After the races, you can upload the data to the cloud. Anyone can set up and modify the race courses using the online setup tools once they have an account at RaceQs.com (the course layouts are crowd-sourced). All boats in the immediate area that have uploaded RaceQs tracking data will show up on the course.
Ralph writes: Those boats that were tracking during the 2019 Lobster Bowl Regatta are set up on Race Qs. If you want to view them and don’t have an account use my email and password: fleet27.
From the data I developed the attached spreadsheet, which shows, for the tracked boats, the time it took them to complete each race, the total distance they sailed in each race, and the average speed they sailed each race. I left race 7 off as we were effectively down to only two boats tracking by then.
Take a look. It is very interesting data, the boats which completed the races the fastest were not the highest speed boats, but more the boats that sailed a shorter distance. The fastest tracked boat in 5 of the 6 races was Tuesday’s Witch. It also sailed the greatest distance in most races, which hugely impacted its results. Vixen and Schadenfreude 2 typically sailed slower but shorter distance and placed higher. As I think about it, boat speed is most influenced by bottom cleanliness, sails, rig set up, hiking, sailing hot downwind, sailing fat upwind, sailing in more pressure, sailing in clean air, etc. Distance is more impacted by sailing the lifted tack, sailing deeper downwind (soaking), pointing higher, hiking, etc. Those boats and crews that were able to sail a shorter distance had better results than those boats focusing on going fast.
The next step is to get inside each race and see if these numbers are impacted most by the upwind legs or downwind. As the season ends, this data can help teams prepare for next year, slow boats can think about why they lacked speed, boats sailing greater distance can plan strategies to stay on the lifted tack and gain height to weather and sailing deeper downwind.
All pretty interesting stuff, and a lot of fun to think about during the off season.
Cheers, Ralph
2018 Review of 9 Apps for Sailboat Race Analysis