Our club has tried a couple ideas over the years…
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Divide the fleet into 2 or 3 sections. I have found if you plot out each boat’s finish positions or, better yet, their series rankings, versus sequential race number and look at the resulting “snake graph,” the groupings of boats with similar skill levels usually jump out of the page. One approach would be to use a prior series (or year) to seed the current series groupings. Other approaches are possible, as well.
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You could try scoring using the statistical “z-score” (Google “z-score” to learn more about the parameter). It will take a spreadsheet to calculate this since Sailwave does not calculate the needed parameters
, so this can be somewhat complicated. But the z-score takes each boat’s current finish position, subtracts its average finish position (from all previous races), and divides by the standard deviation of its finish positions in all previous races. So, with the z-score, a boat is rewarded for (1) doing better than its average, and (2) maintaining consistency (low std dev). In theory, the top boats should not do well in this approach because it is hard for them to improve on their average score (since they are always near the top and you cannot finish better than 1st). In practice, the top boats do insert themselves occasionally. It may be that this approach needs a good-sized fleet - maybe 10 or 15 boats to work well. -
Score using elapsed time handicaps and apply personal handicaps. Sailwave does handle this well, but you need to buy into taking finish times. This is probably the only good way to level the playing field among the various skill levels, but for a one-design fleet to adopt time handicaps is a big change to the usual one-design race committee process.