Running up to the IOM Worlds, the subject of SHRS race formats did come up in conversation a few times. Since the IOM Worlds, unexpectedly it has been mentioned a lot more. There have been three broad topic areas:-

• enabling larger fleets brings bigger entrant fee income, and large championships are VERY expensive to run
• SHRS is less prone to Protest linked regatta delays or pauses in racing. I must say, the Worlds were much more “protesty” than I have experienced before. A good concern to have.
• intriguingly, this months hot topic has been blending SHRS and HMS together in one event

Reflections based on the Datchet IOM Worlds experience?

First off, I wish we at Datchet had real live experience of organising and running an SHRS event. It’s great that we have three race formats (single heat, multi heat HMS and SHRS) available and the management tools that go with them. Brilliant, actually. The sailing sport faces a wide set of outcomes that it might want to address. We need choice! It’s unlikely, especially radio sailing’s high volume, sprint race kind of format, that one tool could do everything. So choice is good!

Quite often it has been said to me that SHRS will be great when the entrants fly in and are basically captive for the week. Everybody stays to the end, right? If your Championship event entails competitors driving through national traffic,…. if competitors don’t feel engaged on the final day ….. do they withdraw and leave early? You bet. Is that just Brits who do that? I don’t know! (From a personal viewpoint, for 60 years people not staying to applaud their own winners at the prize-giving has disappointed me in the extreme. But it happens…)

Maybe the way to look at it would be SHRS for “fly in” championships and HMS for “drive in” championships. If you have a view, write into the website and let us know.

Let me deal with the three common questions arising above:-

1/ Fee Income goes up with SHRS

Let’s suppose you have enough demand for a 100 boat regatta, way above 84 boats. Call it 20% more.

There’s no point thinking this is the Holy Grail for Regatta cost coverage. At the IOM Worlds, we saw half to three quarters of the basic entrant fee income being absorbed by costs as a direct function of the number if entrants. If you’re chasing a financial surplus, or simply trying to avoid financial ruin, then you might think more than twice about SHRS bringing salvation.

2/ HMS brings race pauses and regatta delays from Protest Management

Well, this needs a good look at really. This was my first personal experience of a fully umpired event. we had many more protests relative to a UK focussed event, and the general level of rule observance was possibly a weeny bit controversial.

Inevitably you will wonder how many umpires have to hear a single protest to reach a decision. As you may know, in HMS racing we have historically avoided Standard Redress awards as the scoring software in HMS Excel has no support for it. It’s awful without as it’s manual calculations all the way. What if Standard Redress scoring was fully automated?? If Umpires thought they had a free hand to distribute Standard Redress awards, could it make non-SYRPH protest hearings shorter? Afleet’s standard redress support is kinda of 95% automated already, but what if all our scoring platforms had a 100% fully automated Standard Redress capability? Could the Umpires use that confidence to use these awards to try and shorten hearings?

3/ Blended SHRS and HMS Events

The first time I eavesdropped one of these conversations, I wasn’t sure what was being suggested. It sounds like one or more of the European countries have an idea to run the first three days of a large championship on SHRS, then at the great SHRS split of the fleets jump into HMS heat based racing to keep engagement high for the last couple of days. What do you think of that?? (let us know)

It’s interesting, but a couple of quick thoughts from us:-

• if you have taken the opportunity presented by SHRS to boost your number of entries above 84 boats, how to you transition perhaps a 95 boat fleet into HMS for the last two days??
• One answer may be to enhance HMS Excel, but you may find it useful to know that AFleet has been tested at the 96 boat level. Interesting.
• at the end of the SHRS phase, do you simply load scoring on an HMS system using the current “position” like a ranking table?? Maybe that would be fine.
• We cannot physically expect PRO and competitors to manage more than 22 boats concurrently on the line. Good point, but what’s involved in lifting the maximum number of heats from five to six? It might be easy-ish to do in Excel, and Afleet could do it easily if asked.
• The HMS Rule book schedules A&B for determining heat-based fleet structures/sizes don’t go high enough. Well, not difficult probably to write some more schedules, and in Afleet at least the heat sizings are done by an algorithm, not by table lookup. The algorithm can could handle larger fleets than 84 or more heats per race than 5…..
• If a venue could support heats above 22 for some reason (eg control area location), what about the “promotion setting” choices moving from 4 or 6, to a 4-6-7 type choice? Could be written for Excel and for Afleet it’s not a big deal. There will be some choice of race pattern where a competitor gets more races in on HMS than SHRS?? I don’t know, but probably someone can write in and tell us !!

On any of these types of answers, first up you need to get the skilled volunteers you need to score the event. A large concern actually. By the way, there is more than one camp looking at providing a scoring platform that deals with HMS heat based racing AND SHRS based racing inside the same scoring system. That might make finding skilled volunteers a little easier……