"People ask how fast can you go, can you go 100 knots? The answer is, not with this boat - or at least not with parts of this boat."
go to woe. That was a boat that went to large scale quite quickly and suffered from the pain of doing that. We don't necessarily want to put ourselves under the pressure of having to turn up for a race deadline on a certain date. That often makes a lot of good ideas and clever innovation look bad because it's rushed. It jeopardises the sailing time for the crew and when you turn up on race day and the boat doesn't look that smart and people say it looks like a turkey. Often the baby get's thrown out with the bath water, even though there might be some quite clever stuff there that is never given a chance. The more we go down the path we are going down now, the more I look back at Team Phillips and think that if only it had just had more time and they had started with scale models to get it right at the start, because a lot of that concept was heading down the right path. It ended up heavy and with structural problems, but the basic concept of that boat was aiming in the right direction. Look at how clean the AC72s are starting to look aerodynamically and the amount of effort they are putting into that - pretty much Team Philips was like that. SRM: In the meantime will you try to beat your own record? Paul Larsen: We extended the carne of the boat so it is still down in Namibia. Now that we know our concept for the foils works we can extrapolate those theories further up the speed range by an amount that is significant enough to make it worth going out and doing it. We have finished our mutual obligations with Vestas - they have been an incredible sponsor for us. We got the record and they are happy. They are now off fighting their own wars with the wind energy sector at the moment. I don't really think we will struggle to get funding to go down there again though. Thinking about the safety aspects and all the little improvements we need to make, it would be nice to bring the boat back to work on. Often you build the boat in the shed and then when you get on site you do all the rest with cardboard and masking tape. So it looks great from a distance, but it would be really nice to get it all absolutely immaculate. So we might bring it back to England and do some work on it there. We will make new foils because that foil concept won't get you to 100 knots - it's got a limit, because we haven't beaten cavitation, we have just delayed it until a lot later than people though was possible. You are always going to come up against cavitation at a certain point and then if you start going to cavitating foils then that is a whole other beast. That's where we could start to get up into the eight and ninety knot range. SRM: How much faster do you think is possible? Paul Larsen: The boat is actually structured to go a lot quicker than it is now. We had a Formula 1 team that was fascinated with what we were trying to do from a design point of view and the first two questions their technical director asked were: what are your structural limits and what are your safety margins? That was very astute. People ask how fast can you go, can you go 100 knots? The answer is, not with this boat - or at least not with parts of this boat. What we do know is how fast we can push these foils now and that will be well and truly on the other side of 70 knots. Our existing foil was designed to
July 2013 60
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67