2025: a year in review
Photo Credit: Hannah Lee Noll
As another season comes to a close, we can say it plainly: 2025 was a strong year for RaceSense, and the numbers tell the story better than any marketing paragraph ever could. Across 52 classes that logged starts with RaceSense, we recorded a total of 9,380 boats, led by the usual heavy hitters with some new stars! The J/70 Class led the way as the class running the most RaceSense, followed by the Knarr and Melges 15. The Etchells and VX One classes rounded out the top five, followed by the MC and E Scow, Star, Waszp, and RS21. The year also gave us some memorable outliers: the largest fleet we supported was the Melges 15 Winter Series 2, with 109 boats on the line, while the longest starting line came at the Star Worlds at 1.25 km!
The year included world-class events first, Etchells 2025 World Championship, Star Worlds, M32 Worlds, RS21 World Championship, J/70 Worlds (Open, Mixed+, and Corinthian!), alongside the regattas that have become pillars of the one-design calendar, from the Bacardi circuit and The Foiling Week, through major national championships, continental events, class winter series, training blocks, and high-volume club racing that quietly represents the heartbeat of the sport. In total, RaceSense was deployed across well over 500 events in 2025, spanning everything from focused clinic formats to full championship operations where every inch and every second comes with consequences.
This expansion also marked an important technical milestone for the company. In 2025, we saw the debut of RaceSense RTK in live operations, bringing centimeter-level accuracy to starting line geometry and time-distance calculations for events where margins are already razor thin. Importantly, RTK builds directly on the same RaceSense platform that is already the most widely used and trusted race management system in the sport.
If there’s a single takeaway from this year, it’s that the RaceSense is no longer confined to tech-forward pockets of the sport. RaceSense is now part of the working toolkit across wildly different fleets, geographies, and organizational styles and that trajectory was recognized formally when RaceSense received the 2025 World Sailing Technology Award, accepted in Ireland in November by our co-founders Todd Wilson and Jake Keilman. It was a meaningful moment, not just because awards are nice (they are), but because it marked how far this project has come: from an alley in Miami, to a global stage where performance, fairness, and confidence on the start line are becoming non-negotiable.
We close the year proud of what was built, grateful to every class, race officer, organizer, and sailor who put RaceSense on the line, and fully aware that the real work is the work that comes next. 2026 will bring more events, more fleets, more scale, and, if history is any guide, more ambitious starting lines that test both people and systems. For now, we’ll simply say thank you for an outstanding 2025, and we wish everyone a strong, fair, and fast new year.
