Your boat has physics. Your race had conditions. Everything else? That's you.

The Performance Potential Index decomposes sailing performance into three measurable, explainable pillars.


Physics. Conditions. Crew.

Every race result is shaped by three forces. The PPI measures each one independently — giving racers, naval architects, and analysts a way to see exactly where performance comes from.

Physics Potential

Hull and sail plan efficiency from ORC polar physics. SailEdge Delft-derived force-balance analysis captures what the design gives you — independent of who sails it or where.

Archetype Condition Fit

How well the design type suits the conditions it raced in. The 11-archetype MPAE engine crossed with ERA5 weather data reveals whether the conditions favoured or challenged the design.

Crew Execution

The residual. Everything the crew controls after removing physics expectations and weather context. Tactics, boat handling, sail selection, preparation — measured, not guessed.

Design PPI and Race PPI.

Every boat in FleetEdge receives a Design PPI — computed from ORC certificate physics and weather-model condition fit. It covers 9,591 ORC boats with individual race observations, including boats that have never raced the same event. Design PPI reveals the structural potential a boat carries before it leaves the dock.

Boats with race data receive the full Race PPI — adding the one dimension that cannot be computed from a certificate: crew execution. It measures what happened against what was expected. 1,001 boats with empirical results.

Fleet view — Crew Weight Margin ranking canvas with headlines leaderboards and archetype list
Fleet view — PPI comparison canvas with Crew Weight Margin ranking and headlines leaderboards.

What a PPI breakdown looks like.

Every PPI score decomposes into its constituent pillars. Here is how the three-pillar attribution works for a single boat — an IRONWIND archetype racing in transitional Mediterranean conditions.

The boat's physics potential is strong — SailEdge places the sail drive index at the 93rd fleet percentile. Conditions favoured the IRONWIND archetype, adding an 11.2 sec/nm advantage (79th percentile). But the crew execution residual tells a different story: 6th percentile, well below fleet. Four observations from two venues — the estimate is directional, not definitive.

FleetEdge boat view showing PPI breakdown — AEROBLADE archetype assignment, diagnostic decomposition with crew story model, confidence indicator, and closest competitors
Boat view — PPI decomposition showing archetype assignment, diagnostic summary, crew story model with attribution, and confidence level.

What this tells you: Strong design, favourable conditions — crew execution is the limiting factor. But with limited observations, the score is directional. More races will sharpen the estimate.

No black boxes.

Every PPI score shows its reasoning — what contributed, how confident the estimate is, and what it does not measure.

FleetEdge fleet scatter plot showing Race Performance vs Crew Impact Residual, colored by confidence level — high confidence, medium confidence, and low confidence boats distinguished
Fleet scatter — Race Performance vs Crew Impact Residual, colored by confidence tier.

Reason Chain

Each score traces to its data sources — ORC certificate physics, MPAE archetype assignment, ERA5 weather match, and observed race performance. Follow the reasoning from composite score to individual data points.

Confidence Tiers

Every component receives a confidence level: low, medium, or high. Overall confidence follows the weakest link — a strong design score cannot mask an uncertain crew estimate.

Limitations

Scores state what they do not measure. A single-venue boat is told its estimate may reflect venue-specific factors. Boats in the 40th–59th percentile are described as "mid-fleet" — no false precision.

The data behind the scores.

9,591
ORC boats scored
1,007
with crew execution
429
race-dates enriched
98
archetype-condition cells
Global corpus · as of 2026-04-21 · build a2e90234

Physics from ORC polar analysis, conditions from ERA5 weather data, crew from the residual after both are removed.

Physics. Conditions. Crew. Measured.

The Performance Potential Index — the first three-pillar decomposition in sailing analytics. Every score explainable. Every confidence stated.