While hulas and J-Los might not improve the lot of the average cruising yachtsman, yacht racing generally has made significant contributions to the sport overall in the same way as devices such as ABS brakes have transferred from Formula One down to production vehicles.

If you compare yachting with the aeronautics or car industries it is interesting to note that there are precious few occasions in our sport when the grand thinkers are given the resources to go out and innovate and, most importantly, to test out their new ideas thoroughly.

The America's Cup is one occasion when the ladies and gentleman in their lab coats can do this, analysing hydrodynamic properties using techniques such as computation fluid dynamics and finding out when and how structures will break through finite element analysis to a degree it would not be economically viable to do on their own projects.

Unfortunately while the resource is greatest in the America's Cup, in fact precious little filters down directly to the average cruising boat.

This is simply because your average America's Cup Class yacht with its 5-tonne hull and 20-tonne keel bears almost no resemblance to something a family might pop across to France in for the weekend.

Much of the innovation is simply to beat rules. Hence it is unlikely we will see hulas, batwing-shaped spreader tips or even double rod rigging (less windage than single rod) appearing on cruising boats.

Perhaps the greatest benefit to come out of the America's Cup is that the yacht designers involved get to carry out the equivalent of a highly paid PhD, usually in one particular aspect of the boat's design.

Seasoned cup designer So if your cruising yacht has been drawn by a seasoned America's Cup designer, you can rest assured that the same brain that conceived your fine vessel has also spent long hours in front of a powerful computer or alongside a tank at some grim institute investigating the minutae of what makes yachts go quick.

Few contributions come from the racing world suitable to pure cruising boats where speed is not an issue. However there is an increasing demand for performance in cruising yachts - particularly away from the budget end of the spectrum - and it is here we are seeing many go-faster features from the racing world making the transfer across.

One of the greatest areas of development is in materials.

For example carbon fibre was first used in race boats in the early 1980s and has since dropped in price dramatically.

Over the last decade carbon fibre spars have gone from the rarefied worlds of unlimited offshore racing and the America's Cup to being commonplace now in midmarket cruiser racers upwards.

The advantage of carbon fibre over alloy is that spars can be made with the same physical properties, but with considerable weight saving.

Some way behind carbon masts in its acceptance on board fast cruising boats, but a development we can expect to see gaining popularity over the next decade, is composite rigging made from super materials like PBO or Vectran.

These can be as much as 75% lighter than rod rigging.

Weight savings aloft, allowing lead to be taken out of the keel with no reduction in stability, give a yacht greater pace and so are highly desirable in performance cruisers.

Carbon fibre hulls, with either a Nomex or a foam core, are the current state of the art in race boat construction.

In New Zealand, Martin Yachts, the builders of Ellen MacArthur's Open 60 Kingfisher, have a new Reichel-Pugh designed 67ft performance cruiser in the pipeline that will be the first production boat (to our knowledge) to have a fully carbon hull.

"Carbon does cost more, " explains managing director Steve Martin, "but you need less of it because it is ten times stronger. However you have to use an exotic process by which you manufacture with it."

Martin says they have conceived the new boat - being marketed through Ancasta in the UK - after they built a number of similar fast cruising boats for clients.

New breed of people "There's a new breed of people who I think of as our customers who are experienced yachtsmen who have had exposure to performance racing boats, " explains Martin.

Currently in build the company has a carbon fibre Owen/Clarke fast cruising boat - again all in carbon - that resembles a pumped-up version of Kingfisher . High tech racing sails are similarly migrating to fast cruising boats. Moulded sails, such as Sobstad's Genesis or North's 3DL or Doyle's 4D, keep their shape far better than sails cut in panels and made from conventional materials like Dacron. They are also lighter.

"We 're doing a Genesis sail which will have Taffeta on the outside of it which should make it not as completely as durable as Dacron, but not far off, " says Jeremy Robinson, technical director of Sobstad UK.

"Some customers have bought some of our standard Genesis sails for cruising, " he said. "They may have done some racing and said 'to hell with it' - we don't want Dacron sails."

So it almost comes down to the standard of the cruising sailor, Robinson added. Big cruising boats like Swans upward aren't using Dacron any more. They're using a laminated sails or Spectra.

At present moulded sails cost around 30-50% more than their Dacron equivalent.

Robinson says their ultimate aim is to "get a laminate sail with the durability of a Dacron sail for the same price".

One area of yacht racing where there has been the most significant crossover to the cruising world is in Open 60s, like Ellen MacArthur's Kingfisher . In developing offshore racers for single handing designers are trying to achieve many of the same aims they are with ocean going cruising boats: to create a boat that can be sailed fast and efficiently by a small crew.

While beamy Open 60 hull shapes are unlikely to catch on (again that is a rule thing), other aspects already have and more are to come.

"Canting keels will be much more prevalent in cruising boats in the near future, " says Rob Humphreys, who was part of the Kingfisher design team and draws cruising boats for production builders Elan, Northshore and Oyster.

Canting keels were first tried in the Mini class (21ft Open 60s) and then scaled up and used on Open 60s themselves.

Adopted on maxis They have since been adopted on maxis such as the new maxZ86 class and the glamorous Wally yachts.

"Canting keels give a boat a lot of power without adding any crew weight, " says Humphreys.

"I am quite keen to do some canting cruising boats."

In addition to canting, he added, these would also be lifting keels to reduce draft. "It can be done. There are different ways of doing it. And you can improve the durability for grounding loads with shock cages, a cartridge system with a buffer on it, etc."

Southampton-based designer Jason Ker also has a canting keel cruiser racer on the stocks.

Over the years the Open 60 class has introduced many new ideas and technology appropriate to cruising boats.

These include simple things like leading all lines from the mast back to the cockpit where they can be within easy reach of the crew to new types of headsail furling and sails to more advanced gear like PCbased autopilot systems.

While in racing there is more demand for designers and equipment manufacturers to conjure up performance innovations than there is in cruising, racing also provides about as good a test bed as you could want.

By their nature race boats are always sailed to the limit and it is hard to imagine a more rigorous trial for a new design feature or a piece of equipment than, for example, to send it out on a three month long, 26,000 mile non-stop voyage around the world.