Hi,
There about a zillion things that you can do to make sure your boat will go to weather better. There are people better qualified on this forum than I, but I have had an E-27 and raced it successfully for 33 years. Maybe, in that huge amount of time, I finished off the podium a dozen times.
Okay, so here we go...
If you have a new main and an old main, then the new main is the one to go with. It will be flatter, better, and--trimmed correctly--should help you to go where you need to go. Sails are your engines. You may have a Briggs & Stratton in there now. What you want is a Ferrari V-12.
That said, I was helping a gal I know on a delivery in the fall down Florida's east coast. She'd just bought the boat and I had not seen it until we started the delivery. We hoisted the main and used it the entire first day. It also had a roller furler, about a 135. When we got to where we were going the first night we put the boat away and sacked out in a Marriott. The next morning we took the bagged-out, hopeless main off the boat and deposited in the nearest Dumpster. It was that bad. The boat had another main. It came off another boat and didn't go all the way to the top. But it was better than what we had discarded. Now, the boat has a purpose-built main and sails beautifully. Bad mains are bad news.
I don't know how much you know about sail trim. The main never goes above the centerline on a beat. ON the centerline is key, though. Some days it will need more draft, some days less. You can accomplish that with main sheet tension, outhaul tension, Cunningham tension and halyard tension. If you don't know about all this stuff, you have some work to do. But you have to know it all. If you are willing to learn and make the effort, there is no stopping you. Let me give you an example. About 18 months ago--it was my very last race, though I did not know it at the time--I had three of the sharpest crew I have ever assembled on my boat. I drove. The other guy in the cockpit was strategy and tactics and did the winches on the tacks. I had a gal for the foredeck and a guy with her who did the main. The race was a 12-miler in Sarasota Bay. As it was a reverse handicap race, all the boats got their handicaps at the start. Theoretically, then, all the boats in a given class should finish about the same time. We finished 6:24 (in real time) before the second place boat in our class finished. Sailed well, your boat is a killer.
If you want to reach me privately, my e-mail is
mstine7611@earthlink.net. Phone number is 941-776-1237. It's Florida, west coast.
Morgan Stinemetz