We’ve seen a lot of experimenting with race formats over the past 15 years. First, the Olympic classes brought in shorter course racing to replace the old one-race-a-day-around-an-Olympic-triangle-sausage routine. The Volvo Ocean Race has introduced in port racing to complement the ocean-going offshore legs, and now Russell Coutts is revolutionising the staid world of the America’s Cup with shorter courses and superfast catamarans.

Nothing is sacred any more in the racing world, and mostly that’s a good thing. Of course, not all these experiments are going to work, but we’re never going to find out unless we try.

British sailor Andy Budgen has just headed out to Sydney for his third season on the 18 Foot Skiff circuit, and I read his report from the opening race of the season which he also happened to win. It was a handicap race, but instead of people starting at different times or having their times calculated after the finish, the top-seeded boats had to sail to a windward mark further up the course while the lower seeded boats could bear away at the nearest windward mark.

This seems a beautifully simple way of keeping sailors of different abilities together on the racetrack for more than just the start and the first two minutes of the first beat, yet I haven’t seen much evidence of this being used elsewhere. Maybe something for people to try in national fleets in this country? Once sailors have spent the first couple of days at the national championships sorting themselves into gold, silver and bronze fleets for example, maybe everyone could start of the same start line but the gold fleet could sail to the furthest mark and the bronze fleet to the closest, with silver in between.

Having spent many years racing in the 49er fleet, much as I love the boat, the endless windward/leeward courses became a bit tedious. Coming back into the International 14 fleet was fun because we got to do some reaching again. Some people ask what’s the point of sailing on reaches when they’re so processional? Well, if they are processional, then I’d have to agree. Unless places are changing in the fleet, there probably is no point. Which largely rules out any reason to have reaching courses in light to medium airs where everybody is handling the boat very competently and more or less travelling at maximum speed.

But I remember racing in a windy 14 regatta at Lake Garda on a square course, and there were more thrills and spills and place changes on the tight reaches then there were on the upwind or downwind legs. Picking a moment to hoist the gennaker - or not - was a critical decision, and sailing in the “death zone” of a beam reach was simply not an option. There was no rhumb-line sailing, it was either sail low or sail high, so there were plenty of tactical options.

For the same reason, I’ve always thought it was a shame that the 49ers haven’t experimented with reaching courses, although no one can accuse the 49er class of resting on its laurels. Quite apart from the technical developments along the way such as increasing the rig size and going to square topped mainsails, the 49er has led the way with emblazoning gennakers with national flags in the Olympic regatta, first seen in Sydney 2000.  And for the top 50 finishers in the worlds, their finishing position becomes their sail number for the period up to the next world championship, when the numbers are reallocated once more. Other classes have since followed suit.

Now two former 49er Olympians, Canada’s Ben Remocker and our own double medallist Simon Hiscocks, have launched an experiment to test new race formats on behalf of the International 49er Class Association, of which they are both vice presidents.

Known for the time being as ‘Theatre Style Racing’, Remocker explains the concept: “We’ve got a series of goals, one of which is that the best sailor should win the event.” Sounds obvious enough, doesn’t it? But this doesn’t always match up with the next of Remocker’s goals, that “the winner of the final race wins the event. It’s not that easy to align those two goals, but we are experimenting with different rates formats to see if we can find something that achieves both.”

While the medal race has been moderately successful in creating more media interest, Hiscocks and Remocker believe it can be taken further. “The trouble is, the TV camera has to be very far away to respect the needs of the sailors,” says Remocker, “so we thought if we put in a lane boundary on either side of the course, we could have a number of fixed TV positions, knowing that the sailors could get out of the way because the TV cameras would be stationary.”

Hiscocks’ and Remocker’s vision is for racing in an arena, with spectators watching from floating barges positioned on either side of the course, with the boats racing up and down the middle on a windward/leeward track. They even envisage a narrow lane down either side of the course between the spectators and the racetrack, where the jury, photographers and TV cameras could all be positioned, much as they are on the touchline of a football pitch.

Although there were no spectator barges, Hiscocks and Remocker organised the first trial of ‘Theatre Style Racing’ just before Skandia Sail for Gold Regatta, attracting 20 boats including seven of the world’s top eight ranked teams.

The fleet started out with standard gold fleet racing, with the top eight going through to the next stage for a final phase of fleet racing before the top four then went into a match racing phase. In Weymouth the ISAF World No. 1 team from Australia, Nathan Outteridge and Iain Jensen, beat last year’s world silver medallists, Skandia Team GBR’s John Pink and Rick Peacock in the final.

Remocker says the trial went down very well with the sailors, and now the plan is to hold similar trial events before each major international regatta, with the next one in Perth at the end of the year followed by Miami in early 2011.

Already, some things are becoming clear, such as a 3:1 ratio between the length and breadth of the course, although the scoring scenarios, and whether or not match racing is an appropriate way to conclude the regatta are all ongoing debates.

“People certainly enjoyed the gladiatorial elements of match racing in the 49er,” says Remocker. “In the petit-final you’ve got the battle between bronze and leather, and in the main final of course its gold and silver that is up for grabs. And unlike a medal race, you know that the winner of the final race is going to win the gold medal, which has obvious appeal to media and spectators.”

Whether or not you want to move from a fleet racing format into a match racing finals is another matter for debate, although of course this was the way the Soling used to race in the days when it was the Olympic keelboat. The notion that a keelboat is the only legitimate type of boat for match racing has been dealt a big blow by none other than Russell Coutts, the acknowledged master of match racing keelboats, who has now controversially introduced catamarans into the America’s Cup. This will have a massive trickle-down effect to the rest of the sport, where perhaps other regatta organisers might consider fast cats and planing dinghies for match race events.

That said, there are other ways that the 49er class that could experiment with fleet racing finals but still produce the winner of the regatta from the winner of the last race. You could, for example, have a four-boat final where the first boat to win two races becomes winner of the Gold medal. Of course, whoever won the first race would then become a target for the next race, as the other teams would need to make sure that that boat didn’t win a second successive race. So an aggressive, gladiatorial element could then enter proceedings, where you almost have a hybrid of a fleet race and a match race.

There might be some serious flaws to this idea, but to my knowledge no one has ever experimented with this format. The 49er class is posing interesting questions for the rest of the sport to consider. And with a big debate about the  future of Olympic racing due to take place at the ISAF Annual Conference in Athens this November, the “Theatre Style Racing” experiment couldn’t have come along at a better time.