Divisions, Ratings and Performance

by Ulli

The Pacific Cup organizers have published their updated "believed final" Divisions and Ratings for 2010, which have changed quite a bit over the previous semi-final ratings, not the least in Cirrus' division. Nevertheless, from a broader perspective the overall pattern is the same.

The PCR (Pacific Cup Rating) is the expected performance of a boat in s/nm (seconds per nautical mile; the smaller the number the faster the boat). The expected total sailing time of a boat is therefore PCR * distance, where the official distance is 2070 nm. For the final ranking of the boats the corrected time is determined as:

corrected time =
(actual time sailed) minus (PCR * 2070)

Any boat sailing exactly at her expected performance would then have a corrected time of 0h (zero hours), and if it were faster, the corrected time would be negative. This is why graph (13) on the Cirrugator front page is so helpful to judge performance.

The graph in this post shows all boats of 2010 by division and their expected sailing time in days. By this token the slowest boat is Victoria in Div A with 15.79 days, and the fastest position is shared by Limit and Pegasus in Div E, both at 8.65 days. They would sail 7 days 3 hours faster, almost twice as fast as the slowest. That's why they start 5 days later.

The biggest differences of up to ~20% between fast and slow within one division are in Div E, followed by the double handers in Div DH2; in both cases this is easy to understand because of the limited number of boats. The other divisions are quite well balanced.

Cirrus is at the bottom of performance in Div B. The difference to the next boats Bequia and Relentless is 8h 37.5min, and to the fastest, Pneuma, it is 24h 9min. So if Pneuma were to cross the finish line first, and Cirrus would cross as much as 1 day and 8 minutes later, it would have beaten Pneuma.

If Cirrus were in Div A it would be the fastest boat in that division, but only 3.6h ahead of the next fastest, Brainwaves. But Div A is currently already 10 boats, and Div B only 9.

While I think it feels a little bit better to actually (hopefully) be ahead of the pack and not just by numbers, I'll settle for Kim & Lou's earlier comments: "Cirrus is the benchmark in Div B"!