Hello, i'm french and my english is very bad, sorry about that...
I'm the president of "association classe promo" in France. We are about 180 pilots in competition, so it is the most popular class in france. I don't know if you know this class in Australia? and if you practice "classe promo" ? (we are the little brother of the class 5)
we have a forum, if you want to discuss with us : association.classepromo.xooit.fr/index.php
and also a website : classepromo.free.fr/
So tell me how is the practice in competition in Australia, how many? the level? if you have pictures of your promos (In France we have constructors and they try to win courses to sell more promos so because of that, it is a very dynamic class...
please talk back to me here (and sorry for my english :)
my french "promo" here made by "roule et vogue" (http://www.roule-vogue.com/fr.html)
F495 not many of us sail promo's. We mostly build our own yachts. When we started I was the test pilot (as you can see by my avatar) or "crash test dummy".
'Landyacht' did most of the constuction and with his wife and myself competed in Argentina on hired yachts. He also has another design as a first time constuctors yacht which can be seen elsewhere on this forum. We build mainly from recycled materials including sails(windsurfer etc)re-cut and re-sewn.
I am glad to see interest from other parts of the world in "our" forum.
Bonjour F495 (limit of my French!)
There are a few promo class yachts in Aus. As test pilot mentioned we built some to practice with before going to Argentina. Having said that many of the class 5's that sail here would fit into promo class as many class 5's here use wheel barrow wheels and have sails that would fit into promo class. My promo yacht is a lovely yellow!
Our biggest problem is the aluminium for the mast. Now that promo is in FISLY specs the aluminium dimensions required are not available in Australia. We can get something very close but just outside. When international submitions were called for prior to the finalisation of the promo specs we requested the aluminium dimensions picked would take this into account. However when the final specs came out this had not happened 
As you can imagine it is not viable to source aluminium from Europe to make masts!
Australian class 5's are a number of generations behind Eurpean class 5's but more suited to our sailing conditions.
As Australia has only a very small landsailing community, very far spread out we do not get many opporuntunites for racing beyond the club level. Still there are a few enthusiatic ones who have travelled overseas to compete over the years so we are very keen to hear what is going on elsewhere.
Very glad you have found us. I did look on your website and forum but lack of French was a big stumbling block
Hopefully you will stay in touch and keep us up to date.
I looked on the FISLY pilot database to see if I could find out your name - I wondered if perhaps we had met before but it was not listed.
Looking forward to hearing more.
cheers
Susan
Aus 38
Below is the promo yacht I hired and sailed in Rada Tilly
promogirl is quite on the ball. most Australian class 5 yachts would fall into the PROMO specs , very few run larger than 4.00x8 rims.
. the promo specs make it hard to build a chassis that can pack down small enough to be able to freight easily from Australia.
Its great to see that the promo class is doing well in Europe.
when we do get back to Europe to compete I think this would be the best class to race
this is a yacht we refer to as a Lake Lefroy mini, which is slightly bigger than a Ludic, has the same wheelbase as a Blokart. we are slowly getting a fleet of these racing
this is my current class5, a promo in spiritif not details
cheers Paul, AUS 3
