Success at the 56th ORC Congress
by ORC Media 5 Nov 2025 16:25 AEDT
4 November 2025
56th ORC Congress © ORC
On Tuesday, at a well-attended meeting of the 56th Offshore Racing Congress (ORC), with 31 Congress members from 19 countries in attendance, several important features of this system were reported:
- 2025 was another year of positive upward growth measured in number of certificates issued worldwide (14,265 of all types through 31 October)
- 2025 has had a record number of boats (9648) to receive ORC certificates of all types, an increase of 5.0%
- A record number of ORC Superyacht and ORC Multihull certificates have been issued thus far this year
- The number of countries where ORC certificates have been issued is at an all-time high of 45 nations
- A new rating office is now established in Ireland, with nearly 100 certificates already issued in 2025
The complete 2025 report to World Sailing on the ORC Rating Systems is at orc.org/sailors/news-archive/orc-annual-report-2025-now-available.
Besides providing an overview of the system made by ORC Chairman Bruno Finzi, another primary function of the Annual Meeting is for the chairmen of the various ORC Committees - Promotion and Development, Rating Officers, Offshore Classes and Events, Measurement, Race Management, Management and the International Technical Committee (ITC) - to report their recommendations to the Congress for changes to rules and policies for 2026.
The work of the ITC forms the most important core to the ORC's primary product - the Velocity Prediction Program (VPP) - that produces fair ratings and scoring options for a wide and growing variety of boat types, from Sportboats to Superyachts, offshore racing monohulls to offshore Multihulls.
Among numerous topics that describe the work of the ITC this year, Vice Chairman Alessandro Nazareth led a lively discussion on proposed changes to the VPP's Residuary Resistance (Rr) formulations. This is a hot topic now due to discrepancies found in the rated performance of the new XR-41 - the winning Class B design at this year's ORC Worlds - and a few other designs. A proposal for a modified Rr treatment addressing these boats was approved by Congress, but ITC work will continue in the next months to examine more thoroughly the issue more thoroughly and to perform new CFD analyses to help reaching a new Rr formulation.
Another issue that will receive further ITC attention before the end of the year is the role of Age Allowances. Currently this is capped at 15 years, but it was agreed to examine the effects of possibly extending this to 20 years and/or at different percentage rating benefits based on age.
Continued development of the ORC's Weather-Routed Scoring tools were also discussed, where for 2026 a web-based application called RaceFlow will get further refinement to allow the user to utilize this powerful new tool in offshore race scoring.
All ORC Committee Minutes are found at orc.org/agm-2025.
The Offshore Classes and Events Committee reported the following ORC championship events for the 2026 racing season:
The ORC Championship events reported and approved for the 2027 season are on the ORC calendar at orc.org/sailors/events-2027.