Well that is cutting it fine because the updated ORCi Club rating for Passion X with the jib set flying just came through on the email. It is pretty well as expected as I ran a few trials before committing to the purchase. I have the speed targets from the trial ratings and they are so close to the official ones that I will save the paper and ink and use the trial ones as a sail selection guide. In some very limited wind angles the code zero is a potent beast adding half a knot over that very narrow range. The speed targets show very little angles and wind speeds where the larger asymmetric spinnaker would be more useful and then only if on the pole and not tacked to the centreline.
So I have voluntarily added sail area so that our terrible ratings under ORCi Club and IRC are even more terrible. If the wind is fresh we will be carrying a penalty for sail area we cannot use so we have to hope for very specialist conditions where the breeze is light and just in front of the beam.
The new ORCi rating is 1.0987 up which I thing is a fair increase. We could not however sail to the old rating and in a breeze will find the extra .006 a difficult addition.
As expected the IRC rating was extreme due to the code zero being treated as a head sail. The rating has gone from 1.111 to 1.127, an increase of 0.016 or almost three times the penalty under ORCi.
It will be interesting to see how we fare against these ratings over the coming season but our interest is just in going as fast as we can in whatever conditions we meet so it should be fun.