S/V Chim Chim · Rig Change, March 2020
A new mast went in during March 2020. Comparing VPP performance before and after, race type for race type, the boat sails meaningfully closer to its model upwind — and slightly further from it downwind.
"Matched races" = only Newport–Ensenada and Santa Barbara–to–King Harbor, the two race types run both before and after the change — see below for why that restriction matters.
Nothing was logged between Les Voiles de Saint Barth (April 2019) and Newport–Ensenada 2021 — a two-year gap, plausibly 2020's disruptions as much as anything rig-related. That gap happens to fall squarely around the March 2020 mast install, so "before" and "after" are unambiguous: 26 races, 2015–2019 vs. 8 races, 2021–2026.
It's also a trap. Every long ocean passage in this fleet — TransPac '15, TransPac '17, Caribbean 600, Pineapple Cup — sits in "before," and none recur "after." TP15 alone (147,575 downwind points at 101.6% of target) is enough to inflate the raw "before" downwind number on its own. A straight before/after average isn't measuring the mast; it's measuring which ocean races happened to occur before it.
| Overall | 94.2% → 90.5% |
| Upwind | 87.8% → 97.8% |
| Reach | 81.0% → 85.5% |
| Downwind | 95.8% → 90.5% |
Restricted to the two race families that were sailed both before and after the mast — 4 races (2016–18) vs. 7 races (2021–26) of Newport–Ensenada and Santa Barbara–to–King Harbor. This is the comparison worth trusting.
All 11 races behind the comparison above, individually. Best-in-column values highlighted.
Correlational, not proven causal. Nothing in this data tracks what else changed around the same time — sail inventory, rig tune, crew. "New mast" is the change the user named; it's the leading candidate, not a confirmed sole cause.
Small samples on both sides. Four races before, seven after, in the matched comparison — enough to see a real pattern, not enough to call any single number precise. The upwind gain is large and consistent across most of the after-era races; the downwind dip is smaller and closer to the noise floor of a fleet where individual-race ratios already swing 66–102%.
The ocean-passage question is simply unanswerable from this data. No long downwind passage has been sailed since the mast went in, so whether TP15-caliber performance is still reachable with the new rig has no post-2020 test case yet.
race_vpp_performance, same P85-vs-MM_polars methodology as the leaderboard report (see "The Downwind Outlier"). Era split at event_groups.gStartDate < '2020-03-01'. "Matched races" = gName LIKE 'Santa Barbara to King Harbor%' or 'Newport%Ensenada%', the only two race families present on both sides of the split. Category weighted ratios computed as SUM(ratio×n)/SUM(n) across races within each era, same volume-weighting convention as the leaderboard's pooled-race stats.