Its tricky though Clive.
On the one hand I am no fan of the Great Lakes tendency for people in smoke filled rooms to decide what they think handicaps ought to be.
On the other hand, whether they measure to class rules or not, its clearly inappropriate to use a handicap developed from data for non foiling boats for foil equipped boats. Whether the foiling implementation is a success, partial success or failure the chances that a "correct" handicap for a foiling boat will turn out to be the same as that for a non foiling boat is pretty much zero.
With hindsight, in my opinion we made a major error with Portsmouth Yardstick in not splitting off foam sandwich/carbon spars from wood/grp and tin rig boats. Our predecessors got it right when they split out cotton and terylene sails. To my utter astonishment I have data I have comfortably confident in that suggests that wood Solos are around 5% slower on elapsed time in a race than foam sandwich ones. It would be an even bigger error not to split off foil boats from lowriders.
You've got to say, then, that an RC should consider the yardstick number for a foiling boat to be a trial number, and that's really a finger in the air exercise. If you take the same principle as redress then an RC has a duty to make the racing as fair for as many competitors as possible. It is not reasonable to refuse entries from boats that have trial numbers. How are you going to get numbers if you don't allow them to compete? It could be argued though that its not unreasonable to say that such boats aren't eligible for trophies, or that their handicaps may be adjust post race PROVIDED ALL THAT IS MADE CLEAR IN THE NOR.
That brings me on to another feature of PY calculation as it relates to boats with binary performance like the Cherub or anything with foils. The Portsmouth Yardstick calculation discards from consideration any result that doesn't get up to a reasonable percentage of the winners corrected time. The original plan behind that was to exclude raw beginners, boats that missed the tide gate, boats that spent half the race upside down etc. However what is also does, for boats with extreme performance, is to exclude results where the conditions plain don't suit the boat. So British Moth results in breeze don't contribute to the number, and nor do Cherub and Canoe results in drifters, or Moths in non foiling conditions. So this means that a Portsmouth Yardstick number is not an average of the performance in all conditions, its an average of the performance in conditions that reasonably suit the boat.
20 years ago I'd have said that was monstrously unfair. Now I think its probably reasonable. Consider, you, and maybe even I could design a Cherub that was a light airs flyer and pathetic in planing conditions. Call it Rebel[grin]. Could it win a championship? Only if the conditions were very extreme. If you can't expect to win a championship if you bang the R corner on every beat you can't expect to do so if you bang the corner on design. So maybe its not unreasonable that if a class has banged the corner on design its similarly disadvantaged.
As for extraordinary bias against Cherubs at Hayling. Really? Does a crab s*** in the harbour?
Disclaimer: these are purely personal opinions of Jim Champ, former Cherub, Canoe and Moth Sailor. They in no way represent the views of the RYA or the RYA Empirical Handicapping Advisory Committee.