Kimba said...
So if they make 5 to test, 1 is best, the other 4 are inferior and they still sell them off. Or are they only selling the "winning" set of prototypes.
It's a fair question.
I only spoke regarding North as I spent a bit of time recently talking to their testers / designers in Maui and asked a few questions as I was curious.
I wanted to know what they were actually testing them (the race sails) for, what they were trying to achieve; more top end, bottom end, wind range? The answer at that point was not really any of the above. They had made some sails with variations to materials in particular panels and wanted to see if that would affect the durability or performance; like one layer of this instead of two layers of that etc.
It's a complex process and I was impressed with the amount of time and effort that went into what seemed like fairly minor differences.
The point I was making though, was simply that the protos were built to the same standard of finish as the production sails.
From reading some of the above comments is sounds as though other brands may make protos that are thrown together just to test a particular aspect.
To answer the question though, yes, I would assume they (North) would sell off all the protos.
I bought five protos and the build quality is one of the things I liked about them.
