Investigation report of the 2026 Newport Bermuda Race F-TCF Scoring Error

2026 Newport to Bermuda Race © Stephen R Cloutier

The Bermuda Race Organizing Committee (BROC) along with US Sailing has completed its review of the F-TCF scoring error that manifested during the 2026 Newport Bermuda Race.

For 120 years the Bermuda Race has been organized by passionate and experienced competitors ashore and on the course who are dedicated to executing a world class event that is attractive to all who aspire to race offshore. We hope this review will help reinforce the commitment the BROC has to continuous improvement on behalf of our most important constituency, the competitors.

The Executive Summary is included in this newsletter. The full report is linked below.

On the morning of Friday, June 19, 2026, the Bermuda Race Organizing Committee (BROC) issued Forecast Time Correction Factors (F-TCFs) to the Newport Bermuda Race fleet that were subsequently found to be in error. The error was not raised until Tuesday, June 23, when a competitor flagged a questionable F-TCF discrepancy between two nearly identical boats. That report triggered an investigation that has found two distinct, independent problems:

1. A human process failure on race morning. Additional weather and current files were downloaded from within the routing software for later comparison purposes. Unknown to the operator, two conflicting GRIBS files remained active alongside the official data sources during the optimization run, producing corrupted, effectively randomized elapsed-time calculations. This was the dominant cause of the Friday morning error.

2. A separate software defect. The routing software produced different results when routing the fleet in a batch ("fleet mode") versus routing boats individually. This defect was discovered early during the investigation (by June 25) and has since been identified and corrected by the software's developer. While at the time this bug was discovered, it was the only known cause of F-TCF errors, it was later determined to be a very small contributor to the magnitude of erroneous F-TCF values.

Corrected, individually run F-TCFs were delivered to race officials on Wednesday, June 24, at which point the Race Committee corrected the results. Following several days of redress hearings, the International Jury directed publication of results on June 26, using the corrected F-TCFs. Those results have since been confirmed accurate and reproducible through multiple independent re-runs.

This report documents the sequence of events relating to the erroneous F-TCFs, the root causes identified to date, an analysis isolating the relative impact of each cause, the steps taken to verify the corrected results, and the corrective actions BROC is adopting to prevent recurrence. Consistent with our July 25th update to the fleet, BROC and its Technical Committee are sharing what we learn so the broader offshore racing community can benefit. Section 8 also identifies broader policy questions this incident has raised — about F-TCF's fairness value relative to its complexity, and about the underlying ORR rating rule — which BROC intends to address through separate reviews.

Read the entire report here...