The managers and staff of the Offshore Racing Congress (ORC)
are pleased to announce the 2022 version of the VPP and
Rules are now published and ready for use. 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 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
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) – this 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 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.
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.
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’s 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 are 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.”
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