Goodall Design Viper F16: New DS Solo Rig

The new Viper hulls are looking good, more equipped with this innovative DS mainsail fitted on a shorter mast. Why a shorter mast? Read Brett Goodall’s comments on this new project sown below.
I have sailed many times my own recreational RC16 solo and its a blast to sail the Viper shots is this article, lots of fun.

A shorter mast & DS mainsail for the Viper solo mode seems logic and follows too the work done in the A-Class with shorter masts. Andrew Landenberger & Sandro Caviezel have both reported no handicap in lower winds. But still that shorter rig is to be proven on a major event.

Goodall Design & Laurent Verbeeck (Commercial Manager in Europe) developed the rig and we will see one racing in the F16 Class in the future without a doubt.

Below comments we gathered from Brett & Laurent:

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Brett Goodall: “This was a fun project that started with a good friend that asked how we could make the VIPER the perfect solo rigged F16.

We initially we didn’t put much thought into a deck sweeper… but the more we looked at it, the more it made sense for solo sailors. The F16 has a max luff length in the class rules, so the entire rig need to be shorter to allow the sail to “sweep”.

The F16 is normally super powerful. Then once you remove one of the sailors we didn’t feel this lack of rig height would be a determent to the performance, but sailors would see the gains available from the DS… net result is an increase in performance.

Feedback from the testing at the new Goodall Design Testing Centre in Belgium is very positive. Sailors comment about how smooth and balanced the boat is. We are confident this translates into racecourse speed.

The boat we are testing is completely standard, but has a custom carbon mast that we had made in Austria to match the bend characteristics of the Aluminum mast. Although this mast is cut shorter, sailors will be able to rig this on their standard VIPER masts for and instant swap between solo and 2up sailing on the VIPER!!!!