HAL's Race Results - Scoring Made Easy

HAL's Performance Analyser Overview

HALPA is a program to analyse the performance boats achieve in handicap races of all types. The data is taken from HAL's Race Results archive files.

The analysis procedure is heavily based on that laid down by the RYA for the Portsmouth Yardstick system and proceeds as follows:

  1. After starting the program, the user opens a HAL's Race Results archive file. The program reads the results for all handicap races (i.e., races, other than pursuit races, for classes other than level-rating ones) into an internal database within the program.
  2. The program produces a summary of results in the internal database.
  3. It does an analysis using the following procedure for each race:
    1. Calculate the average corrected time across all the boats that finish the race.
    2. Temporarily eliminate those boats that are poor performers. The definition of a poor performer is a boat whose corrected time is a certain percentage slower than the average (default 5%, but adjustable on the quality settings screen). This is on the assumption that such boats had problems, or stopped for a picnic.
    3. Throw out those races with less than a certain number of finishers that are good (that is not poor) performers (default again 5, but adjustable on the quality settings screen).
    4. Recalculate the average corrected time using the boats that are good performers. This is known as the Standard Corrected Time (SCT).
    5. Bring back the boats that were eliminated as poor performers. Calculate the time correction coefficient (TCC) actually achieved by each boat, using the SCT as the benchmark.
  4. The program gathers performance statistics for each boat for each type of handicap (eg Portsmouth, IRC, Small Cat):
    1. The average TCC achieved.
    2. The number of results used to calculate that TCC.
    3. The lowest and highest TCC.
  5. The program does a similar analysis for each type of boat, by aggregating the statistics for all the boats of a certain type (eg. Laser, Sigma 33).
  6. The program allows the user to download the analysis by boat or by type into an Excel spreadsheet.