Analyse Race Data

Once the preserve of elite sailors, data gathering devices are now accessible to all. It’s time to get smart, says RUPERT HOLMES

- Rupert Holmes

The benefits of post-race analysis that’s informed by as much data as possible are clear, and it’s almost a decade since I first wrote about data logging and analytics in this magazine. Yet, still most teams do little other than the decades-old practice of talking about the high and low points of their race in the bar afterwards.

In this respect, the sailing world lags far behind other sports, although a number of innovative companies are pushing the state-of-the-art forward in this field. In doing so, they are also making this technology available to an ever wider group of sailors.

In 2010, simply logging the data needed for analysis on dinghies and keelboats was a challenge in itself. The hardware used by the British Olympic sailing team in the run-up to the Qingdao Games was developed by Pi Garda, then a subsidiary of the Cosworth motor racing team. The sailing world benefited from 140 person-years of software development that had already gone into the motorsport product.

At that time, retail prices for the equipment ranged from £1,800 to £10,000 and uptake was slow outside the highest echelons of the sport. Nevertheless, this system was able to reveal, for example, how fast to spin a Dragon keelboat in a tack to minimise loss of ground.

One aspect that hasn’t changed since then is the need to spend time after a race or training session looking at the data. In the case of analysing tacking of Dragons, the efficient method was figured out during a two-boat training session, with each boat tacking numerous times. The two helms had very different styles – one was gentle and smooth with helm movements, maintaining good speed in the early part of the tack, but was slower by the time he had borne away onto the new course.