1/4 tonners + the cup

Does any crew who have put a campaign together wish to publish the costs they have spent and then each to their own can judge the costs as to whether it is expensive or not!

Dont get me wrong I have nothing against optimisation of any boat (quaters included) to what the owner interprets as IRC friendly mods. My gripe is that in order to take any quater tonner to a competitve level, (as generally they have either been neglected for years in a shed or turned into a cruiser), it costs a huge amount of cash in order to do so.

But at the end of the day if you can justify spending lots of money on a little old race boat fine...I suppose this is indicative of Keel boat racing in general, Its an expensive sport!

In general in sailing performance based handicap doesn't mean that. It's meant to be a handicap for the boat, not the helm and crew. I say "in general" because some clubs do apply personal handicaps to some racing but that's different from what systems like PY and PHRF set out to do, which is to handicap the boat or class.

How the administrators of performance-based systems can actually differentiate between the performance of the boat and the skill of the crew for one-off boats is perhaps, like the manufacture of sausages, something best not looked into too closely.