With 176 entries, one of the outstanding successes of the dinghy racing season was the Fireball World Championships in Teignmouth. I spoke to Steve Chesney, chairman of the organising committee for the event, to find out some of the secrets of the Fireball's success. One thing that came up early in the conversation was that the class committee have made a conscious bid to put the wants and needs of the middle-order and back-of-the-fleet sailors before the high-fliers at the top end.

"The class has focused on its core membership rather than the leading lights of the fleet," was Steve Chesney's way of putting it. "We've focused on this theme of inclusion, making sure that everyone feels they're getting something out of the class." It sounds so obvious when you have it spelt out like that, to serve the needs of your biggest audience. And yet how many class associations are run from the top down? The vast majority, I would hazard a guess. Because the people at the top end of the fleet are the more accomplished sailors, they are seen as the opinion leaders and trend formers, and they tend to end up making up the bulk of the committee. And then the committee puts itself in danger of becoming self-serving, thinking of the needs of the top flight rather than ways of nurturing the fleet as a whole.

This is not a criticism of the people involved. It is a largely thankless task being part of a sailing committee, and the only people who have a right to criticise their class committees are those that are prepared to do more themselves. But one of the problems with the way classes are run is that their annual general meetings tend to be held during the National Championships. From one point of view, this makes absolute sense, because nowhere do you get a greater gathering of numbers than at the Nationals. But it can also be a very elitist gathering, with the huge numbers of club sailors and ‘Swallows and Amazons' potterers very under-represented at a racing championship. And so there is little drive to attract new blood to a championship, because the AGM becomes a self-serving event for those already signed up to the racing cause.

Steve Chesney has been a keen Fireball sailor for 20 years now, and when he first got involved it was still a very top-driven class. But in the late 80s there was a move "to drill down into the membership", and find out what the whole fleet wanted. Bear in mind that 20 years ago, the Fireball was one of the primary battlegrounds for boatbuilders, mast manufacturers and sailmakers to assert their names. Just about every major sailmaker had at least one jockey in the fleet, with the aim of winning the Nationals or Worlds, and selling lots of sails off the back of that success. So there was a lot of buzz in the class, but it could be quite an intimidating place to be for the middle-of-the-fleet sailors. And I should know, because I was one of them.

Then the big plastic-boat revolution of the 1990s came along, and the Fireball looked under some threat from boats like the Iso and RS400. But the Fireball responded well to the challenge. The construction rules were still written around the boat's original concept as a home-built kit boat, but by the 80s nearly everyone was buying professionally-built boats. And one of the rules of the class said that the sides of the cockpit had to rise vertically from the floor. This made it very difficult for builders to construct plastic Fireballs that could be popped out of a mould. 

So the class decided to rewrite the rules and permit a slight slope in the cockpit sides. This had no effect whatsoever on the handling or performance of the boat but it meant the cockpit could be moulded in one piece. This one rule change meant that professional builders could reduce building costs by up to £1,500.

The Fireball class was also an early instigator of the Gold, Silver and Bronze fleet divisions, a concept that many other classes have since adopted. In 49er international events, for example, fleet sizes are limited to 25, so the race to qualify for the top 25 of Gold is absolutely crucial. If you miss the cut at the end of the qualifying series, then the best you can hope to finish after that is 26th overall if you end up in Silver, or 51st if you end up in Bronze. There is no consolation prize for ending up in these divisions, and quite often you get made to feel like second-class citizens as Gold fleet racing tends to take precedence when time or wind are in short supply to the race officer.

In an Olympic class, this elitist approach is understandable, but it is an approach that non-elitist, amateur classes can ill afford to follow. This is where the Fireball class has scored so highly. Steve Chesney says you can't afford to pay lip service to the scheme, and the Fireballs have gone out of their way to make the Silver and Bronze fleets seems like mini-championships in their own right. "All the best prizes go to sailors in the Silver and Bronze fleets," explains Steve. "The Gold fleet winners get the trophies, but the big prizes like drysuits, wetsuits or new sails go to people further down the fleet. It's also quite a badly kept secret that some names get overlooked when we're pulling ‘random' names out of the hat for spot prizes!" The aim is that by the end of the week, everyone at least feels they could have come away with something, even if it didn't happen that particular week.

The other thing the Fireballs do differently is by using a subjective committee-based process of dividing sailors into Gold, Silver or Bronze. "I suppose you could call it a Wimbledon-style seeding, where the divisions are decided by a bunch of people sitting around talking about it," says Steve. So if some ‘unknown' sailor turns up, never having raced a Fireball before, called Brotherton or Carveth for example, then he won't automatically be put into the Bronze fleet.

Another thing that has gained popularity in a number of classes, but with mixed results, is the buddy system where a top-of-the-fleet sailor is paired off with a mid-to-back-of-the-fleet sailor. This is a great idea for sharing information, tuning tips and encouragement around the fleet, but can easily wane if sailors don't put enough energy into it. So the Fireballs have a social evening where the beer is free - provided you turn up with your buddy. Now there's an incentive to inspire you to share those top tuning secrets.

Steve says the inspiration for such great ideas comes not from one individual, but from a very energetic and committed class committee. The loyalty of so many Fireball sailors to the class bears testament to just how successful they have become. Steve's 20-year love affair with the Fireball is by no means unique. Vyv Townend, my old school mate who won the recent Worlds crewing for Chips Howarth, has been sailing Fireballs for more than 20 years too. I bumped into Jim Turner at the recent America's Cup Act in Sweden, where Jim was doing his grinding for the French K-Challenge, and he asked me to pass on his congratulations to Vyv. Through gritted teeth, I should point out, as Jim and a couple of other sailors have been superseded as the most successful Fireball crews ever, their two World Championship victories now being eclipsed by Vyv's three wins.

So what keeps people like Vyv and Steve in one spot for so long? Steve says being part of the Fireballs is like having an extended family that spreads around the world, to Australia, the Americas, continental Europe and parts of Africa. "We stay in each others' houses, we send each other Christmas cards," says Steve. But it is also about the boat. Back in those ‘dark days' of the early 90s, when the boom of new boats arrived on the scene, Steve says he always felt optimistic about the Fireball's future. "We were always confident that the design of the boat would see her through, because of her ease of sailing, and low all-up weight. On the water we felt it would always sell itself very well, because it was a boat built for sailors." Aren't all sailing boats built for sailors, I queried? Steve counters that the Fireball was never designed as a ‘product' in the modern sense, but simply as a boat for sailors.

Steve points out that at less than 80kg, the Fireball is still a light boat even by modern standards. "The hull weight is around 30 per cent less than the Iso, I believe." Steve also reckons the Fireball is easier to sail than most modern classes. "It's flat-bottomed, it's got big chines, with rails on the bottom which all make it incredibly stable. Any numpty can sail a Fireball...." By comparison, some of the double-bottomed plastic boats of the modern era are less stable, and many are less well-behaved.

I was never a fan of the Iso in its original form, with that horrible kick-up rudder borrowed from a catamaran. I haven't tried the Iso in its more modern form, so I'm not in a position to judge it now, but I raced in the first Nationals and it was not a particularly pleasant boat to sail. But I was still a fan. It was a revolutionary boat. Suddenly, for around £4,000 you could race other moderately high-performance boats on equal terms. This was for about half the price of a Fireball, and with none of the associated arms race of the Fireball that existed then, whether it was selecting the right hull shape, mast or sail combination. Or being the wrong weight, because it should be remembered that what gave the Iso its name was in its pioneering use of weight equalisation, using those trademark plug-in wings.

The Fireball was shaken out of its complacency and duly responded with smart ideas such as the cockpit change that made the boat cheaper to produce. I'm sure the professional approach of the class association and the clever ways it has encouraged more sailors into the fold owes some debt of thanks to the Iso, which itself was dreamed up by a former Fireball World Champion John Caig. I call it the Ryanair effect. I may not be a fan of driving up to Stansted and then racing in a stampede across the tarmac against my fellow passengers for the best seat on the plane. But I appreciate Ryanair's cheap prices and the fact that they jolted British Airways and the older airlines out of their overpriced ways. Ryanair has made the airline market better for everybody, and so has the Iso in the world of dinghy sailing.

These days, the Fireball is much more one-design than it was, with Winder Boats providing a standard package that is good enough to win the Worlds straight out of the box, along with some less common options such as the Swiss Duvoisin hull, for those still looking for something slightly different. I should allow Steve Chesney to finish what he was saying, before his fellow Fireballers take offence at what he was saying earlier. As he pointed out: "Any numpty can sail a Fireball," but what he also went on to say before I interrupted him, was: "It's also incredibly difficult to get the best out of it. If you take a wave badly, for example, you get punished. So there is a challenge there for everyone, from the least experienced to the best."

The easy-to-sail-but-difficult-to-sail-well concept brings to mind the Optimist and I say as much to Steve, at the same time fearing he might hit me for comparing his beloved high-performance trapeze boat to a seven-foot box. "No, I think the comparison to the Optimist is perfect. One of the things we like about the Fireball is you can take it out in virtually any weather. But I remember one particularly windy day at Carnac [in northern France], and just as we were coming in battered and bruised thinking enough was enough, a bunch of kids in their Oppies were just going out." And for that, and many other good reasons, I'm sure we'll be talking fondly about these floating boxes for years to come.