Validation Analyses
The claims on this site, tested against the fleet — in plain language, with the methods and the numbers attached.
Claims on this site are tested, and the tests are published. Three analyses run against the fleet data: whether any design type can buy the podium, how much the crew matters inside a design type, and whether projected boat profiles predict races as well as measured ones. Each is summarized here in plain language, and each links to its method and its numbers.
All three carry the Validation badge — directional results while the validation program completes — and recompute as the fleet grows. Terms are defined on Data Definitions.
Race-data corpus · scored ORC and IRC races · as of 2026-07-01
Can any design type buy the podium?
The ORC promise is that a fairly rated boat wins on sailing, not on shopping. That promise makes a testable prediction: across enough races, each design type should reach the podium about as often as it shows up on the start line.
So we counted — not one championship, every scored race in the corpus. Across 7,652 boat-race results in 572 class-level fields, every archetype’s share of top-three finishes lands between roughly half and 1.4 times its share of participation. No design type owns the podium, and none is locked out. The full table — including the archetypes running ahead of or behind their entry numbers — is below, because publishing only the flattering rows is not validation.
| Archetype | Participation | Podium share | Ratio | Podium 95% CI |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AEROBLADE | 22.9% | 29.5% | 1.29× | [27.4%, 31.7%] |
| DEEPFRAME | 17.4% | 21.4% | 1.23× | [19.5%, 23.4%] |
| AEROMAX | 15.9% | 9.0% | 0.56× | [7.7%, 10.4%] |
| GRAVITYRUN | 12.9% | 7.7% | 0.60× | [6.5%, 9.0%] |
| GLIDEFORM | 10.5% | 11.1% | 1.06× | [9.7%, 12.7%] |
| STORMLINE | 4.2% | 5.0% | 1.17× | [4.0%, 6.1%] |
| IRONWIND | 4.1% | 4.8% | 1.16× | [3.9%, 5.9%] |
| STEELCORE | 4.1% | 5.0% | 1.23× | [4.1%, 6.1%] |
| HEADFORCE | 3.2% | 1.9% | 0.58× | [1.3%, 2.6%] |
| STEELFORM | 2.4% | 2.6% | 1.08× | [1.9%, 3.4%] |
| KEELFLEX | 2.4% | 2.1% | 0.90× | [1.5%, 2.9%] |
Boats compared within their class · fields of 6 or more · podium = top three · full method below · as of 2026-07-01
Reading the gaps. The departures from 1.0 are real, but bounded — and on their own they do not indict the rating. A design built for breeze will under-collect trophies in a light-air season, and class make-up differs by region. Separating weather effects from rating effects is the next scheduled deepening of this analysis.
One caution we state plainly: FleetEdge’s archetypes are built from ORC certificate data, so using them to evaluate ORC outcomes is not fully independent. What this analysis can show is internal consistency — that no design strategy the certificates describe is systematically able to convert its rating into podiums. Independent ground truth comes from the bridge check below.
Inside a design type, the crew is the difference.
For every boat in every scored event, FleetEdge splits the result into the pace the design should deliver and the pace the crew actually extracted. The leftover — the crew’s contribution, in seconds per nautical mile — is what the ORC promise says should decide races.
It does. Compare typical crew contributions across the eleven archetypes and they differ by about 56 seconds per mile. Look inside any one archetype and the spread between its sharpest and its struggling crews is about 114 — twice as wide. Which boat you sail shapes the race; how you sail it separates the results.
Boat-event crew residuals · archetypes with 30+ observations · negative = better · full method below · as of 2026-07-01
Do projected profiles predict real races?
Every boat in a scored race gets a predicted pace from its physics profile. Compare that prediction with the pace the boat actually sailed and you get a gap, in seconds per nautical mile — the smaller the gap, the better the profile describes the boat.
For boats with a measured ORC certificate, the prediction is typically off by about 41 seconds per mile. For mapped-IRC boats — whose profile is projected from their ORC design family rather than measured — it is typically off by about 52. That looks like a difference, but with only 94 mapped-IRC race observations so far it is within the noise: on today’s evidence, a projected profile predicts a race about as well as a measured one. The mapped-IRC sample grows with every scored IRC event, and this comparison updates with it.
Formally: the medians are 41 (95% confidence range 38–44, from 1,388 boat-event observations) and 52 (range 35–68, from 94). The ranges overlap, so the evidence cannot distinguish the two groups.
Per-event actual-vs-predicted pace gap · full method below · as of 2026-07-01
How these numbers are made.
The fairness distribution. Cohort: scored races under ORC and IRC rating rules; boats compared within their class where a class division is published; race-class cells with fewer than six observed boats excluded; podium = the top three places in a cell; one result per boat per cell (best rank). Confidence intervals on podium share are Wilson 95% intervals. Sensitivity: raising the field floor to eight (383 cells, 6,445 observations) leaves every conclusion unchanged, with ratios spanning 0.56–1.38.
The crew effect. Per boat-event crew residuals under the canonical polarity (negative = better). Only archetypes with thirty or more observations are compared. "Typical" is the median; the within-archetype spread is the interquartile range.
The bridge check. Per-event gap between predicted and observed race pace. "Typically off by" is the median absolute gap; confidence ranges are bootstrap 95% intervals. Mapped-IRC boats are identified through the published identity pairing between IRC entries and their ORC design-family representatives.
Coverage. Observations count boats in the FleetEdge corpus; a race’s full entry list can be larger. Counts follow the vocabulary on Data Definitions.
What these analyses cannot say. The fairness distribution cannot yet separate conditions effects from rating effects, and certifies no individual rating. The crew effect describes dispersion, not causation. The bridge check’s mapped-IRC sample is small and its interval wide. Each recomputes with the publication run and carries its badge until the validation program completes.
The numbers. Every figure on this page, with cohort definitions and intervals, is published as a machine-readable artifact: validation-analyses-2026-07-01.json. A new artifact is published with each recompute.
Evidence, with error bars.
Every analysis names its cohort, its interval, and its limits — and updates with the fleet.