There is an article on the class web site entitled
which is the best A-cat?
. It was written in 2001 and their have been a few changes since then. Anybody care to weigh in?
Bob Hodges wrote that article and it was highly informative for me as well. He tunes in on occasion and is still at the pointy end of the fleet so let's hope he updates it for us.
The advice to me from Lars Guck was ... If you have a 2002 design or later the boat won't hold you back for at least a couple of years at the national level...(flyer wave piercing design innovation) for a club level racer lots of designs will work and it just depends on how good of shape the boat is in. Get a good boat and go sailing.
After that... it depends where you are in the pecking order and what level to you want to race at for the equipment to really matter.
Good luck
Hi TheTudor,
A-CAT are quite similar in hull shape since the Flyer pierce-wave design has spread across all boat builders but Goran Marstrom.
Bimare has probably the biggest production and the hull shape is designed for average German sailors with appropriate volume (its bigger export market). Since 2002 it is all carbon/vinylester
like its peers. Boat settings are a bit cheap, but the boat is the cheapest by far. Marstrom boats are Carbon prepeg/honeycomb sandwich, and use 300gramms / square meter carbon, instead of 200gramms for foam sandwich technology boats.Australian boats have the best settings by far and also the best sails are Australian as well.
Hope it can help
The A3 now being produced by Lars Guck at GuckInc is Carbon-epoxy, not vinylester. Having seen 2 boats fresh from the mold as well as the one he built just prior to the NA's they are exact built works of art. They are not the carbon beauties that Marstöm builds in beauty, but they are work of art racing machines built in Bristol, RI.