by GreenLake » Wed Mar 02, 2011 11:45 pm
It's possible to arrive a some answer to this question based on the data that are already available on this site.
I looked at the results for the 2009 and 2010 national championships and plotted them in a scatter plot, ranking vs. hull number. By adding more results, you could improve the conclusiveness of this analysis.
Here's what I found:
Sail numbers above 11,000 are scattered through the top half of the fleet, with two exceptions (but those boats probably didn't race at all for some reason, they had the worst score of all boats).
There were very few boats in the 4,000 to 11,000 range, only 6% of the total. One scored well, the others poorly. Statistically, only the fact that few in that range participate at all would seem to be significant (unless additional results are integrated to get more data). That range seems to be disproportionately represented by DSII's (looking at the unofficial sail number index on this site) which corroborates the statement that DSII's are not as (or not perceived as) competitive.
In the range of sail numbers from 1 to 4,000 the results are very evenly spread, with no real clustering. Ranging from the best results to near the worst in the championships. This even spread could mean that the boats in that range are all roughly equal, or that both boat performance and crew performance are randomly distributed wrt. sail number.
What is clear is that these older boats seem to make up the majority of entrants into the championships.
(In the early years sail number and hull number are different, sail number is what gets recorded in the race results).
~ green ~ lake ~ ~