I've been out watching the warm-up regatta to the Rolex Farr 40 World Championships in Newport, Rhode Island. Not very dinghy, is it, although even Farr 40s get roll-tacked in light winds and many of the lessons learned in this world are equally applicable to small-boat racing. Such is the quality and cut-and-thrust of the opposition, the best way I can describe Farr 40 racing is 40-foot Laser racing. OK, so the owners are a pretty different breed, with millionaires and even billionaires choosing to compete against each other. But the thing about the Farr 40 is that it is a very strict one-design, so there are few speed gains to be found, and it is an owner/driver class so these squillionaires aren't just standing at the back watching a bunch of professionals tearing up $100 dollar bills. They are in there, getting their hands dirty.

The added attraction of the Farr 40 - or deterrent if funds are in short supply - is that you are allowed up to four professionals on board, with the rest of the crew being constituted of amateurs. So owners sign up some of the hottest talent in the sailing world to be their tacticians, with the likes of Russell Coutts, John Kostecki, Terry Hutchinson and Brad Butterworth standing at the back of these boats.

The result is some of the tightest, tactical, cut-and-thrust competition that you could possibly imagine. It is refreshing watching these guys race, because even the legends get it wrong on a regular basis. When you have the benefit of watching a race from a dispassionate viewpoint, outside of the boat and outside of the race course, mistakes look so avoidable. Of course when you're in the thick of it, it's so much more difficult to remain emotionally detached from what's happening. Based on watching these races, I drew up a hit list of some of the areas where there are clear gains to be made. I reckoned that if these were areas of improvement for these sailors then they might be useful for the rest of us too.

Starting

No surprises here, but 90 per cent of the race seems to be won or lost in the first 30 seconds off the start line. I'm sure I've mentioned before the importance of being able to bear away that tiny fraction, get the sails really driving and equally crucially, get the foils really biting into the water. As soon as you get stall across the foils you're in big danger of falling sideways into the bad air of the boat to leeward. This applies as much to dinghies as it does to keelboats.

Terry Hutchinson, tactician for Emirates Team New Zealand and also for the Farr 40 Barking Mad, says they spend a good chunk of their practice time purely on this phase of the race. The team uses a ‘time and distance box', a box of electronic tricks linked up to a GPS unit, which of course is not replicable on a dinghy, but the basic slow-boat manoeuvring is certainly something that any of us can practise. Hutchinson explains, "We'll practise the basic manoeuvre time after time, the holding the bow up to gain your space to leeward, and then the dip to build speed. It's all about creating that perfect final 15 seconds up to the line. It's helping calibrate my eye, calibrating the bowman's eye and the navigator's time and distance on the electronics."

The best non-electronic substitute I've experienced for practising pinpoint-accurate starts is an exercise that Rob Andrews used to run for us when he was coaching the 470 Olympic squad. It involved having a two-minute countdown to the start, and the goal was to start off the middle of a championship-length line - even if you were sailing by yourself - at full pace and as close to the line as possible. Taking transits was not allowed, because the aim of the exercise is to build your spatial awareness of where the line is.

As a photo of almost any championship start will show - even at Olympic level - most of us believe the line is closer than it really is, evidenced by the line sag that you'll see in the photo. The aim of this exercise is to avoid being a victim of line sag. Rob would blow one whistle for the start time and another whistle for when your bow actually crossed the line. Invariably there would a time gap of a few seconds on the first few runs across the line, but as you get used to the time gap you become bolder with your judgement about where the line really is. In my experience that exercise really does sharpen up your starting very quickly.

Of course the Rob Andrews exercise requires a coach or an extra set of eyes to watch your approach to the line, but if you can't find someone to do that for you, what about teaming up with another boat? You could take it in turns to practise the start and then take another turn observing the start of your practice partner.

Mark roundings

The Farr 40s race on a windward/leeward track, with a windward mark and spacer mark nearby, and a leeward gate at the bottom of the track. With almost 40 boats of virtually identical pace racing on the same track, it's no wonder that the mark roundings are congested, with enormous opportunity for place changing at every corner. It was amazing to see boats attempting to charge in from the port layline in the search of a non-existent gap between the wall of starboard-tackers. It brings home just how much better the port side of the course has to be, in order to justify the severe disadvantage of approaching the windward mark on port tack. At the same time, if you get away with this high-risk approach the gains could be massive, so it's understandable that some of these guys persist in trying the port-tack option.

Leeward mark roundings

Being the progressive fleet that they are, the Farr 40s have been keen adopters of the leeward gate, creating more options up the first part of the second beat than a single leeward mark would ever allow. The opportunities for gaining or losing at this point of the race are also enormous. The rapid decisions that need to be made are too complex to go into here, but I remember 49er World Champion Chris Draper telling me that one of his overriding principles for the leeward gate is to get in and out of this zone as quickly as possible. That might sound obvious when it's put that way, but you see people regularly doing otherwise.

Take, for example, one of the most common mistakes - and I see plenty of Farr 40 rockstar crews do this in Newport - when you hold on to your spinnaker until the very last possible moment. This puts enormous pressure on getting the take-down absolutely right, and if you don't you can either end up sailing past the mark or at best, rounding up on to a windward course but with the mainsail and jib still flapping because there hasn't been sufficient time to get them pulled in. So while the entry to the leeward mark might have been superfast, the exit ends up being superslow. Top coach Jim Saltonstall likes to play back video footage of leeward mark roundings in his coaching sessions, and when he shows it to people they don't need telling. It's so obvious when you see it for yourself. Get the kite down early!

Tidal gates

Of course there are a couple of exceptions. If you have another boat breathing down your neck, threatening to claim water at the two-boatlengths circle, then there is some justification for dropping the spinnaker late. And then the one where it almost invariably pays to keep your spinnaker drawing very late is where you're plugging an adverse tide. I'm sure this was one that the Olympic sailors cottoned onto pretty quickly at the recent Olympic Test event in Qingdao, where the tide was exceeding windspeed at times. Again if you come back to Chris Draper's basic philosophy of getting in and out of the leeward mark as rapidly as possible, with an adverse tide it's all about just getting around the mark any which way you can. This time it's keep the kite pulling at all costs. In light winds you can even round the mark with the spinnaker still up because the tidal conveyor belt will take you upwind regardless of whether your kite is still flying or not.

Chinese jibe

I was amazed to see what good press the Qingdao regatta received, although perhaps that is because I have read more GBR media than from elsewhere around the world. You can forgive a venue most things if it still allows you to fly home with eight medals, including Ben Ainslie's extraordinary podium-topping performance in the Finn. It seems that visitors were so bowled over by the friendly reception from the locals and the incredible onshore facilities, that people were almost prepared to forgive the pitiful sailing conditions. Granted, there were a couple of days that looked pretty exciting, when the breeze actually got up into double digits, but it sounds very much like this was the exception to the prevailing conditions. One of the race officers, Peter ‘Luigi' Reggio, who is principal race officer for the America's Cup, said there was talk one day of not sending boats out to race because it was blowing more than 12 knots of breeze. Luigi and some of the other visiting race officers soon made their views felt on that, but if the local organisers think that 12 knots is a gale then it says something about the typical conditions in Qingdao. Heaven help the Olympic Regatta two years from now, because it sounds like divine intervention is the very least that will be needed to prevent the embarrassment to our sport that so many of us have been fearing.