2022 ORC Rules now published online
by Offshore Racing Congress 2 Feb 2022 08:55 PST
The Offshore Racing Congress (ORC) has published their 2022 rule books on the ORC website.
These are updates of previous year's rules with changes mandated by the ORC Congress meeting in November 2021, along with a deletion of obsolete terms and rules from last year's editions.
Among the changes are improvements to the ORC VPP, such as hydrodynamic CFD modeling for foil-assisted boats, updates of keel viscous drag calculations, improved aero treatment of cat-rigged boats, better sail force coefficients for symmetric and asymmetric spinnakers, new sail force coefficients for headsails deployed to leeward on whisker poles and the introduction of a new term - All-Purpose Handicap (APH) - which is intended to replace GPH as a better generalized scoring and reference term.
These changes will result in small changes in ratings for 2022 ORC certificates, with most boats in the 2000+ test fleet not changing more than 0.5% in APH ratings.
The ORC Rating System rules also have some important updates on how ORC racing is conducted in races and regattas. Among these is a shift in certificate issuance to be digital only and to be valid and available once issued by a Rating Office, replacement of GPH with APH, a more fair treatment of quadrilateral sails that the International Measurement System (IMS) rules now help define, and a re-labelling of PCS to be Polar Curve Scoring using the term Scoring Wind.
The ORC Championship Rules (aka, the Green Book) has also been updated with new CDL class limits based on the 2022 VPP, as well as guidance for Heat racing systems when class sizes become too large to race all entries together.
A new edition of the Race Management Guidebook has also been issued, where general principles are discussed and specific use of APH and PCS scoring is explained.
A complete summary of these rule changes is also published here. Yet to be completed are the ORC Superyacht Rules and the updated VPP Documentation, which should be ready soon.
There has also been a slight re-design of 2022 ORC Certificates that improve the relevance and visibility of the boat's measurement information.
Page 2 of every ORC certificate shows popular scoring options relevant to the national racing in each country - these options are displayed when clicking on the country abbreviation at the bottom of that page or issued by default from that country's rating office.
The 2022 VPP has also now been sent to Rating Offices around the world for them to issue certificates to their customers...contact your national rating office for more information.
Similarly, the ORC Sailor Services web portal to certificates, software and more is updated with the new VPP and is ready to produce 2022 test certificates, Speed Guides and Target Speeds.
"Our staff worked incredibly hard this season to implement some major upgrades to how our system handles offset files for a much broader range of boat types," said Bruno Finzi, Chairman of ORC. "We can now provide more fair and accurate ratings to more boat types than ever before, and we hope this helps improves racing in all ORC fleets at all levels of competition."