Analysing performance in sailing is always difficult, particularly in a development class like the International 14. There are so many variables that it is hard to work out whether any lack of performance is down to the limitations of your equipment or - heaven forbid - your own limitations as a sailor. The nice thing on the other hand, is that with a development class you always have somewhere to hide! If you put in a bad race then you can blame it on all manner of things other than your own failings - your mast being too soft, your sails too flat or your hull being the wrong shape for the chop.

In a strict one-design like a Laser, there is no shelter. If you underperform, the only variable from all the other boats is yourself. Some people enjoy the simplicity of the equation, and their egos can cope with the battering when things go wrong. At least you know where the improvement has to come from, even if that is sometimes a hard pill to swallow.

In a development class it's always a little more complicated. Martin Jones and I have always been fast in a breeze in the International 14, but as soon as we've had to bend our legs we've struggled. Could it be something to do with being one of the lardier teams in the class? Probably...but sometimes it's easier to look for different equipment rather than look in the mirror.

So instead of reverting to a diet of salad and cutting back on the beer, Martin and I searched for other more immediate and less gastronomically painful solutions to our speed problem. The answer was a new carbon mast from Selden, as Proctor masts should now be called. This is quite a bit stiffer than our old mast and hopefully would give us better speed while still being able to eat donuts on an unhealthily regular basis.

The team that have most impressed with their speed in the International 14 fleet are Mike Lennon and John McKenna. They are one of the few teams currently using a Selden mast and have race-winning pace in all conditions. Mike has been with Hyde Sails since before records began, and he has one of the sharpest eyes for a fast sail shape. He is also one of the biggest bimblers in the boat park, the result being an immaculately laid-out and prepared boat.

Martin and I have spent many races over the past year duelling with them in the 14, and every time we get close to them upwind in the light to medium range, they have been a struggle to hold on to. Again, this might be the fact that they weigh considerably less than us, but we preferred to attribute the performance gap to other factors. So we decided, somewhat belatedly, to go for the full Selden/Hyde sails package just a couple of weeks before the big championship, the Prince of Wales Cup at Mounts Bay at the very end of the West country.

Zeb Elliott, a 14 world champion in his own right and the managing director of Selden UK, got a mast together for us in double-quick time. Mike Lennon emailed off a pattern for some 14 sails to be constructed in the new Hyde loft in the Phillipines, and just a week later they had been air-freighted back to the UK in time for the big championship. How about that for service? 

Even so, we still had a rush just managing to get it all measured and set up in the boat for the first day's racing in Mounts Bay. With a list of jobs as long as our arm, it wasn't the most relaxing build-up to a championship. And the breeze was hardly to our liking either, blowing 8 to 10 knots from the south-west. Oh no, time to bend the knees again!

But our rig did what we hoped it would. It gave us more power and where normally we would have battling to hold on to other teams, we could hold our own against anyone - except Mike and John, who sailed off to two huge leads on the first day. Even so, it was encouraging stuff, and we proved our hunch that our lack of light-air pace hadn't been totally down to the donuts.

If the new rig hadn't made us go faster, however, I don't know what we would have done. We would have spent a couple of thousand pounds on a fruitless attempt to go faster, and I would have had to retire to keelboat sailing. However, Martin and I were pretty confident that something good would come of the new rig. I think that comes down to experience, and having some sense of when a lack of performance is down to your or the equipment.

But it hasn't always been that way. I can remember times in my career when I've persevered with hulls, masts or sails that just weren't up to the job. Then, when you get the chance to use something else and your results are transformed, it is a comfort to realise that you weren't as useless as you'd thought, but it's also frustrating to think of the time you've wasted battling around the track with substandard gear.

If you're struggling for pace and don't know if it's you or the equipment that's causing the problem - beg, borrow or steal to get into a boat that is proven fast. If you find yourself going faster, breathe a sigh of relief that you weren't as bad as you had feared you were, but get ready to spend some money. On the other hand, if you're still going slowly, then you can make the painful conclusion that perhaps it's you rather than the equipment that needs changing. At least you've saved yourself the bother and expense of buying new gear. Probably time to spend your savings on some coaching instead!

Flying Moths

One man that has invested a good deal of time and money into improving his sailing is Simon Payne, the newly crowned International Moth European Champion. He actually gave up his job in a bid to beat the Hydrofoil King, Australia's Rohan Veal. Simon explained his radical plan: "At the beginning of the year, we went to the Worlds in Melbourne, and competed on Rohan's home waters. He won every race, I was second in nearly every race and Adam was third.

"Rohan was showing what another year of being on foils had done for him. He was way ahead of us. I have my children over to stay with me every other weekend, so that meant I was only able to sail twice a month. I was only going to beat Rohan by changing something." So Simon changed ‘something', by throwing in his marketing job to take a six-month sabbatical. "Three months sailing and three months to find another job," as Simon puts it.

Simon set about putting in big hours on the water from his home club of Hayling Island, training almost every day for weeks on end. For the Europeans, he drove down to Lake Garda seven days early with training partner Adam May. They did endless training runs up and down the lake in the quest for greater speed. In fact on the tuning beats alone, Simon and Adam measured 160 miles of sailing on their little GPS units.

The training partners treated their week's preparation like a job. "We drove to work every day, we sailed long hours, put time in preparing the boat, and we drove home the same time each day," explains Simon. We decided we'd share everything until the race started. We wanted a Brit to win, and to beat Rohan. He was King Rat. It didn't matter which one of us won it."

By race day, the Brits were feeling very comfortable with the venue and their speed, especially when they discovered Rohan could no longer match their pace. "He'd hang in there for a while, but eventually he'd drop off the back a bit." By the morning of the last day, the Brits were tied on points, a long way ahead of the opposition. Simon went on to win the final three races, taking the event with a race to spare. He counted six 1sts and one 2nd, while Adam won two races and Rohan won one.

Simon says the class is now moving beyond the point where it is a matter of simply getting around the track to one where tactical thinking is coming into play. "I've always thought Rohan was a brilliant foiler, but I'd never seen him race," explains Simon. He has always been so far in front. The objective was to get as good at foiling as he was. Now we're starting to tack and gybe on shifts to go in the right direction. What we are seeing is an era where we're thinking about tactics."

During his weeks of intensive training, Simon has almost reached the point where foiling has become second nature. "You know how when you do something new and it's knackering, because you're using twice as much energy thinking about what you need to do. But as you get better, you can get away with doing less and less. Now in the Moth, I can get away with quite economical body movement. You know automatically when to tense your front leg to drop the bow that little bit."

I was amazed that an old bloke, if Simon will allow me to call him that as he knocks on close to 40, could take on a young bloke like Rohan at his own game. Watching videos of Rohan Veal on his excellent website, www.rohanveal.com, makes foiling look a very physical activity. And this is a guy in his twenties who competes in triathlons for fun. So it gave Simon some satisfaction when Rohan came up to him after a day's racing at Garda and admitted he was exhausted. But Simon remains aware of his limitations. "I know that if I took him on at anything else, he'd kill me, but I suppose I've built up some very sailing-specific fitness," he shrugs.

When Rohan walked into Sailboat at Alexandra Palace this year, he was mobbed for autographs, so was Simon expecting the same star treatment, with girls screaming helplessly and throwing their buoyancy aids at him? "No, I don't think so," he admits modestly, "but there have been some good moments. When Adam and I walked in to the dinghy park at Garda for the first time, everybody there looked round and cheered, just because they liked what we were doing. One day when we were racing, there was an Italian lorry driver standing on the roadside and shouting as I sailed into the cliffs. People love what we are doing. It is great for the class, and the foils are attracting some really good sailors into the Moth."

Small wonder that this little 11-footer is causing so much excitement when Simon is racing around Hayling club courses at the same speed as an Olympic Tornado on a handicap of 644. "Upwind we're clocking 13 or 14 knots at times, and the highest downwind speed has been 24 knots," explains Simon. "But then of course when the wind drops we'd struggle to win off a Topper's handicap." This is because at sub-foiling speeds in less than 7 knots of wind, the hydrofoil surfaces become nothing other than excess drag." In fact the older, non-foiling Moths are still faster in light winds, as Liz Pudney proved when she very nearly Simon to the National title earlier this year.

But for Simon and a growing band of sailors, the positives far outweigh the negatives, and next year he is even considering a cross-Channel record attempt. Simon is certainly breaking new ground with his exploits, and he must be one coordinated individual to be able to master such a tricky beast. "Er, not really," he mutters. "Last week I was texting somebody on my phone and I walked into a lamp post."