Is your class up to the mark?

See how your class ranks in the madforsailing.com championship Top Dinghy Chart

With the championship season just starting, many classes have introduced schemes to encourage improved turnouts for their annual championship - for most classes the barometer of the health of the class.

Dinghy classes in the UK fall into two categories: the newer manufacturer's classes where numbers of boats sold is still the criterion of growth, and the older classes from the boom years of the 60s, when dinghies sold in their thousands and which still form the bulk of the sailing and racing at clubs, but which now sell in small numbers.

For these older classes, the number of new boats sold has little effect on the numbers being sailed regularly and turning out at their championship. It is more a case of the strength of their class association and how attractive they have been able to make the class and its events in comparison to the enhanced performance attraction of the newer classes.

Most classes over ten years old are stuck with old technology and design parameters. No amount of tweaking and rule amending is going to turn a heavyweight plywood box into a lightweight carbon flyer! Unlike car manufacturers, dinghy builders aim to get it right first time - once out on the market they are frozen in time. The Mondeo may be the same in name only from year to year but an Ent is an Ent is an Ent!

Their continuing appeal lies in this perceived sameness and in their class association organisation and numbers which ensure a good open meeting circuit, good turnouts and a supply of cheap secondhand boats. For the bigger basic classes such as the Enterprise, GP14 and the Wayfarer, this is enough to ensure reasonable championship turnouts. The older performance classes, the Fireball, 505 and early asymmetrics, in competition more directly with the new lightweight flyers, seem to hover on a knife edge, their numbers and bullet-proof build quality still proving popular.

We do seem reluctant to let outdated designs die - when a car manufacturer stops producing a model that is it - but with dinghies it seems there is always someone willing to build a couple more and some classes are in constant search of a builder to keep their class 'alive'. But just as with cars, televisions and other man-made objects, we move on, we want the latest and the number of people spending their cash on a new boat who choose an old design inevitably dwindles.

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