This is a great point, and one of the best places/time to see how your boatspeed is in handicap racing. If you get a good clean fast start, you are right with all the good boats. After a while you get a feeling for how you are doing, and doing vs your ratings. Look at boats about the same rating that do well. Look at their boat speed and angle. 95% of the time everyone is on starboard at the start, and relatively close by. This makes this comparison easy.Interesting point @Jackdaw on sailing in the wrong direction, I think the greatest for me anyway is hitting the start line on time and with a full head of steam. Seems the start is one of the easiest places to lose time against the field, while I am getting better at it, it still eludes me to hit the line at exactly (or as close to exactly) at the count of 0 or 0 plus a couple. I love the responses I am reading here though, I find racing a very interesting sport and hope to excel at it, unfortunately yesterdays race was cancelled due to weather, the lake was rolling pretty good after a couple of days of some 15+k winds from the NEN. Oh well there is always next weekend.
And yes, you often see boats start a minute late. Not only is that 60 seconds they will NEVER get back, but now they are in bad air.