For ORC Leaders
FleetEdge measures whether the ORC promise is being kept.
Every fleet has a fingerprint.
Fleet-health intelligence for class and circuit leadership — across every ORC fleet.
Hidden Shape52 dimensions reduced to 31 features and 11 archetypes.
How the corpus clusters before the results arrive.
Read the shape of the fleet before the scoreboard reads it.
The ORC founding promise is that if the boat is rated fairly, the difference in results is the crew. FleetEdge is the first analytical tool that can measure this at fleet scale — decomposing every result into the boat's design contribution and the crew's performance contribution across 31 dimensional features.
For class officials, national authorities, and regatta organisers, this measurement has a specific implication: it provides independent, data-driven evidence of whether ORC's rating system is producing fair competition.
When the top finishers at a major event come from four different archetypes — four fundamentally different design strategies — that is evidence that the rating system is working as intended. No single design approach dominates.
FleetEdge does not evaluate ORC's methodology. It evaluates outcomes — and those outcomes, measured across 11,207 boats and 959 events with race data (from a 967-event corpus), consistently show that ORC-rated fleets contain genuine competitive diversity.
Three capabilities for the ORC community.
Rating Validation
FleetEdge's archetype analysis independently confirms what ORC has long maintained: the rating system produces fair competition across diverse design strategies. At the 2025 ORC Worlds, the top-5 corrected-time finishers came from 4 different archetypes — measurable evidence of rating effectiveness.
Fleet Intelligence
Understand the composition of any fleet before racing begins. Archetype distributions reveal how many design strategies are represented, which dimension families dominate, and where the competitive field is concentrated — information that was previously available only through years of institutional knowledge.
Analytical Transparency
Every FleetEdge analysis is built from public ORC certificate data and published race results. There are no proprietary inputs that officials cannot verify. The methodology — 31 features, PCA dimensionality reduction, ensemble clustering — is documented and reproducible. Every score is auditable: reason chains trace each number to its data sources, confidence tiers state the statistical reliability, and contextual limitations declare what the score does not measure. No black boxes.
See the fleet before the start.
For any ORC-scored event, FleetEdge can produce a dimensional profile of the entire fleet: archetype distribution, competitive balance across design strategies, and the dimensional spread that determines how different boats will perform in different conditions.
This analysis is derived entirely from certificate data and historical race performance. It does not require boat-specific input from teams, and it does not reveal proprietary setup information. It measures the structural characteristics that are already encoded in the public certificate.
Documented and reproducible.
FleetEdge's Multi-Parameter Archetype Engine (MPAE) extracts 31 features from each boat's ORC certificate and SailEdge physics profile, reduces them to 4 PCA factors that explain 87.14% of the variance in the fleet, and applies ensemble clustering (k-means, hierarchical, and DBSCAN consensus) to identify 11 distinct performance archetypes across 11,207 boats.
The methodology is designed to be scrutinised. Every step — from feature extraction to archetype assignment — uses established statistical techniques with published parameters. The inputs are public. The process is documented. The outputs are verifiable.
FleetEdge's analytical framework is fully documented in the Methodology section. Class officials and technical reviewers are encouraged to examine the feature set, the dimensionality reduction process, and the clustering validation in detail.
Named contact.
Direct briefing enquiries from ORC leadership, class officials, and national rating authorities are handled by Kevin Farley, Principal — FleetEdge programme. Kevin is based in Annapolis, Maryland, and is the named technical contact for rating-validation discussions, fleet-level analytical briefings, and governance-adjacent enquiries from the measurement-community.
To schedule an institutional briefing, use the Contact desk and flag the enquiry as ORC/IRC Officials; Kevin responds directly.
FleetEdge validates the ORC promise.
Independent evidence of rating fairness across the international fleet.