Offshore Doubles Global Leaderboard
The Offshore Doubles Global Leaderboard System is based on the scoring system developed by the Sailing Yacht Research Foundation (SYRF Scoring System) for each Voyage (event or solo) and blended according to rules as developed by the Association. Below is some more detail on how it works.
The Ingredients
- POLARS: All boats must have polars as provided by the Offshore Racing Congress (ORC).
- WEATHER: Instead of using forecasts we use the actual weather analysis (Hour 0) that all forecasting is based as updated multiple times per day. The model we choose will be the one that most accurately captures the course at the most appropriate scale. GFS and ECMWF are excellent for truly offshore weather but other models will be considered for coastal races such as HRRR in the US and other products in other places (list to be decided).
- CURRENT: We will use the most accurate current information we can get for the venue. RTOFS is excellent for offshore and tidal models are very good inshore. Some venues like Newport, Solent, SF Bay have very detailed current gribs (tidal mainly) and now Radar is doing an excellent job of current monitoring in many coastal areas (list to be decided).
- ROUTING: The routing algorithm takes the weather gribs, current gribs, and the course and performs an optimization of the route using each boat’s polars to find the minimum elapsed time for the boat to sail the course given the start time (routing parameters to be specified).
The Scoring
The score for each boat Voyage is expressed as a percentage of the actual elapsed time, divided by the optimum routing time found above. This can can easily be converted to a corrected time if desired, but not necessary. The boat that has the highest % performance, wins.
The Leaderboard
We envision (and are well on our way to) automating the entire data capture and real time scoring during a race whether it is a solo race or a regatta. We are still collecting input as to how we want to blend actual events, pinnacle events, solo tracks, shorter and longer courses and how apply the system in a way that allows each individual to have their own ranking no matter who they sail with (portable or individual ranking system). The default might be 50/50 attribution but could be done in a way that more accurately takes experience or skills into account (to be discussed).
The Benefits
Sailors can now sail any boat that has ORC polars and sail with:
- the same or different partners,
- one-design or different boat types,
- together or all over the globe,
- starting at the same time or at completely different times (including past events)
These differences are then all normalized by the weather and the routing algorithm and averaged or blended across events, to create a real time ranking continually updated across the world. The result can then can be filtered to achieve national leaderboards, women’s, mixed and other leaderboard rankings that are interesting to various stakeholders.