The 2020 ORC/IRC World Championship will bring top sailing teams from around the globe to battle on Rhode Island Sound and Narragansett Bay for one of three coveted world titles. The regatta will be scored using a combination of the two most popular rating rules in the sport, ORC and IRC, and racing will be a mix of around-the-buoys racing and longer, offshore courses. The competition will be held at the New York Yacht Club Harbour Court from September 25 to October 3, 2020.
ORC-IRC Scoring System Confirmed
While this big boat handicap championship has been a staple of World Sailing’s regatta slate for many years, the concept of scoring it with two rules is quite new, having only been done once previously, in 2018 in The Hague. The scoring formula is a little more complex, but the end result is a competition that does a more consistent job of rewarding the best-prepared and most-talented teams regardless of the wind conditions.
“The system we agreed to we think will minimize differences in the two rule systems,” says ORC Chief Measurer Zoran Grubisa, who with Jason Smithwick from IRC is co-chairing the event’s Technical Committee. “We have tested this and believe this will be an improvement on what we did in The Hague in 2018.”
The basic mechanics of the scoring scheme are fairly straightforward. ORC Results will be calculated using the Coastal / Long Distance Time on Time scoring model, while inshore races will be scored using Performance Curve Scoring (PCS) with a Constructed course. IRC Results will be calculated as Time on Time using IRC TCC. Corrected times calculated for ORC and IRC will be shown as deltas to the winning boat where the winning boat in each rating system will have a corrected time of “00:00:00” and all others will have corrected time calculated as the difference in time to the winner.
Finally, a single corrected time to determine the finishing place is calculated as the average of the boat’s corrected times in ORC and IRC.
