First to finish – and then some
Dobbs Davis checks out the mighty Comanche...
The establishment of a 30m LOA entry limit by major race organisers several years ago has helped create a development target that is getting ever more attention, as evi- denced by the strong turnout of 100- footers in this year’s Sydney-Hobart Race. In some ways this popularity is reminiscent of the old IOR Maxi class of two decades ago, when IOR-rated 70ft limits prompted design diversity ranging from the powerful and heavy inshore Maxis racing inshore in Sardinia, Palma and elsewhere, to the smaller and lighter ULDB Sleds sprinting downwind to Hawaii (and that’s without even mentioning those giant IOR Whit- bread ketches designed by Bruce Farr). These were very different boats for very dif- ferent purposes, yet they all rated the same. When racing around the buoys with 28 crew became tiresome among the inshore dinosaurs, and the IOR itself fell out of favour, the IMS ILC concept slid in, albeit briefly, to define new limits and permit those who still wanted to go off- shore on large yachts to move on to a new generation of craft. These were new fast 75 and 80-footers that were easily exceed- ing the speeds of the IOR lead mines, as elapsed time records fell anew.
Then when IMS in turn started fading in relevance, and the advent of canting keels then pushed boat speeds into all-new dimen- sions, the limits could no longer be kept at a rated length but now at an actual length. For
34 SEAHORSE
a brief while the maxZ86 concept seemed to be the right place to define the upper limits so the chequebook war could be contained, but only a handful of events and three owners ever embraced the concept; others, meanwhile, just built larger and larger and spent more and more to go as far and as fast as race entry rules would allow.
Fast forward to today and a new natural limit seems to have settled in nicely at 30m overall (unless of course you’re a super - yacht, but few of these present any real threat to elapsed time records), and with it a flurry of design and optimisation activity to bust open the classic race records: Sydney-Hobart, Transatlantic, Transpac, Fastnet, Middle Sea Race, Cape Town-Rio, Newport-Bermuda and so forth. Being offshore races and all now permit- ting canting keels, one would be tempted to assume that a safe design approach would be to extrapolate from what’s already known about this style of boat from the Imoca 60 and Volvo 70 classes. Indeed, their track records for speed and – ahem – reliability is well-known through a variety of conditions when traversing the planet. Yet many of the races of interest are not going around the planet, only to a rock or an island (and sometimes back again), where there’s no room to foot off to the next approaching weather system. Add more competition trying to do the same thing, and there are some very real tactical
elements added to the game… so the design with greater superiority in a wider variety of conditions will have the edge. And remember: this particular clientele are in search of race records, not course records, so simply waiting around for the right weather will not do.
With this in mind, and a little Volvo Race and Rambler (ex-Speedboat) experi- ence behind him, Ken Read has embarked on a new 100ft offshore project with Netscape founder Jim Clark, that is out to topple these and many other race records. Named Comanche after the legendary (and often feared) horse-borne tribe of Indians from the plains of western US, this design may very well prove to be similarly swift and unrelenting in its performance.
Good boats start with good design The principal element to Comanche’s innovative features is the design process that created her. An intimate collaboration was quickly established between Guil- laume Verdier and his longtime design partners at VPLP for the hydro elements to the design and North Sails’s JB Braun for the aero elements. For no less than eight months the three teams iterated the rig and sail design package with the hull and appendages to arrive at where they believe they have met Read’s clear mandate: to achieve the highest possible performance not only at the reaching angles usually
ONNE VAN DER WAL
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