Racing Discussions

A few thoughts on RaceQs.

I think it can provide a useful, and entertaining, post-race review. When it first became available many years ago there were occasional attempts of displaying the tracks at the post-race gathering. The hard part was getting the bar to agree to having one of it's TVs hijacked, and someone providing a computer and the necessary cable interfaces (perhaps can be done wireless today?).

I think it's biggest drawback is the displays are way too cluttered and much of the tabulated and displayed information implies knowledge and accuracy which is not present. So don't stress too much trying to analyze it's data.

The basic boat motion data is a single smart phone data point which measures that "point's" gps speed and course over ground". It does not know your boat's heading; you could be drifting backwards. If your phone has a built in accelerometer (many do) you might get some measure of roll, depending on where the phone is located in the boat and what it assumes as "level".

My biggest issue is with the displayed wind data. On the display you will observe the three wind indicators constantly moving indicating varying direction and strength. This is made up data. Your phone is not measuring any wind info (mine isn't). So RaceQs must be generating this from some wind model or average of local wind station data. The three closest wind stations are Owings Beach (about 1 nmi north), Chesapeake Beach (about 2 nmi south but around Holland Point), and Poplar Island (about 5 nmi east) [distances are just guesses as I type this]. Any average of this data does not provide an accurate measure of the wind variation in speed or direction that we observe over our typical race course, the scale is simply way too coarse.

I also find the depicted sail positions misleading, particularly downwind, as RaceQs often shows many more gybes than boats actually execute.

I find the speed changes displayed with the track info useful, though you can not tell if a speed increase or decrease was due to a change in wind speed, sail trim, boat balance, helm, etc, or some combination. But for instance, Maya's tracks seem to suggest the boat sails faster on port tack than starboard (why is left for me to determine).

Some display features I wish existed (or wish I knew how to implement) are: 1) be able to show the full tracks of more than two boats, 2) have the boat depictions match the chart scale especially at the start (they are too large), 3) remove the false wind info, and 4) an ability to insert our starting box to the display.

As Jim Bradshaw and Jim Watson have encouraged, more boats using RaceQs provides a more entertaining and informational post-race debrief.

Note, RaceQs is a bit of a battery hog, so make sure your phone is charged. And at least on my iPhone 14 turning off RaceQs does not stop it from running in the background. I need to depower my phone and repower it.

Ted

Yeah Andy, thank you for giving us room. We weren’t sure we were going to make it either!?! We were by-the-lee by about 20 degrees, and that has us putting all of the SOG right onto the mark.

We started out going left until almost the layline then tacked over. Felt like we had pretty good wind and boat speed. We were trying to minimize tacks since we haven't been out much this year and had a younger crew helping out and learning.

At the windward mark we were trying to balance boat speed and trying to stay above you to give you enough room to round since we were overlapped after our tack, but I wish we would have overstood a bit more than we did so we could have kept the boat speed up better. We really weren't sure if you were going to make it.

Downwind, we lost some time early on with the top spreader getting hung on the backstay during a gybe and a bit of drunk driving on my part while I tried to fix that while also steering. We chose to try sailing hotter angles instead of wing and wing, but given how Knot Home and Uncloudy day did going wing and wing, that was definitely the better choice. Still learning NS sailing strategy after years of mostly spin. Next time...

Andy Harvey

1990 Ericson Olson 911S #149 Hawkeye

Hi all,

We have some, but not all using RaceQs. It is FREE, fun, and helpful, and only gets better the more boats that use it. I thought some pictures below and description of the helpful analysis available would be provide some motivation for others to use the app.

Knot Home is the only boat in NS-Racing using RaceQs, so we need any boat-on-boat comparisons to a boat in another class. There is a lot of analysis available without comparison to another boat - e.g., tacking performance, consistency of speed and heading, responsiveness to lifts and headers, etc. But, at a high level, one question for any racer is how well was the course sailed vs. how well was the boat sailed. That is where having a comparison boat helps.

Last WNR, Knot Home's strategy was to go to the righthand side of the course. We wanted that so much, that even though we were lead boat in a line of starboard tack starters, we chose to duck Avalon off our windward stern quarter to the right. Revolution was already going right, but after our duck, they were in our wind shadow, and so they ended up going left. Tactic or strategy? I think we our desire for the righthand side of the course might have been misplaced. We think we sailed the boat well, and were at the windward mark rounding right beside Hawkeye. What would have happened if we had gone left? I don't know which way Hawkeye went up the course.

The two pictures attached show Bay Retriever's windward track, and Knot Home's windward track. BR went left; KH right. We both laid the mark in one tack, though, admittedly, all of the KH crew had both butt cheeks squeezed ;-) Hawkeye can comment on what it looked like from their perspective!! Clearly BR is a lower rating, faster sailing, higher pointing boat than KH. You can see from the RaceQs diagrams, BR's track triangle is smaller than KH's, and they sailed 0.69nm to our 0.88nm. For that leg, they corrected a 1:45 faster than us. Having a fast time is about sailing at a higher speed or a shorter distance, or in their case, both -- well done BR.

Any way, hope the play-by-play is part of the fun for everyone.