Hull Analysis — Critical Mass Racing

Analyse boat performance for the season and uncover what may be holding it back.

Port vs. Starboard Performance

Boat speed vs. polar target by wind range, tack, and sailing angle — most recent race on the left.

Starboard tack is meaningfully faster on reaching angles (roughly 70°–150°) in light-to-moderate air (0–12 kn) — 0.3–0.7 kn faster in most buckets, in the best-sampled ranges (hundreds to over a thousand samples per bucket); port is faster upwind (20°–60°) in the 6–12 kn band.
In 12–20 kn the pattern flips: port tack is faster almost everywhere, including the same reaching angles where starboard led in lighter air. A fixed rig-tuning bias should favor one side regardless of wind strength, so this reversal points more toward helm/trim/crew-position habits that vary tack to tack than toward an asymmetric rig.
The 20+ kn band has too few samples (mostly single digits to tens per angle bucket, largely from one race) to draw any conclusion there yet.

Hull Drag Analysis

Detecting performance loss caused by bottom fouling.

No consistent decline in reaching speed (TWA 80°–100°) shows up across the season in any wind band — the two best-sampled bands (0–8 kn, 12–20 kn) hold steady or even improve from June into July 2026, the opposite of what bottom fouling would predict.
Race-to-race swings (e.g. 2.35–3.70 kn in the 0–8 kn band) are larger than any trend, and more likely reflect wind-strength variation within that broad band than hull condition, since 0–8 kn spans everything from near-drifting to a solid breeze.
The 2025 races and the 20+ kn band have too few comparable samples to include with confidence — there's no data-supported reason yet to suspect the bottom needs attention beyond the routine clean already logged on 2026-05-13.