The latest Class 40 from Owen Clarke Design bears a striking resemblance to a modern Imoca 60 with her flip-up rudders, Y-tiller and centralised line management. Compared to earlier Class 40s today’s boats are notably cleaner in approach
Different strokes
The latest Class 40 to come from the prolific Owen Clarke Design stable was created around rather different criteria from the ‘standard’ transatlantic product… as Merfyn Owen explains
As I write this article no fewer than 43 Class 40s are heading out of the Western Approaches on the singlehanded classic, the Route du Rhum. While singlehanded racing is still a strong design driver for the Class 40, the majority of races recognised by the Class 40 Association in Europe, North America and recently the Caribbean are double-handed or fully crewed. Meanwhile, the class itself is now a truly international affair with yachts flagged as far away as Australia, South Africa and nearer to home in Europe, from Norway in the north, down to Italy in the Mediter- ranean. Indeed, in 2012 the number of boats based outside the class’s birthplace, France, exceeded 50 per cent for the first time. Eight years after the class had its first entrants in ‘the Rhum’ and 10 years since
coming into being there are now more than 140 yachts registered, with more than 20 now based in North American waters. It’s from a new owner in the United States that Owen Clarke Design’s (OCD) latest commission has originated, a fully custom (although built in female produc- tion tooling) Class 40, now under con- struction at Carbon Ocean Yachts (COY) in Bristol, Rhode Island. Design develop- ment began in the spring of 2014 which has given all of us a good deal of time as well as resources to apply to a design that is significantly different in a number of areas from what has been seen before. It’s worth affirming at the start that, although often described as Open 40s, the class is definitely not open in the sense that most of us would understand the word. The Class 40 is, like any number of successful rules like the TP52, a box rule that allows designers a degree of freedom to innovate within set parameters. In the case of the Class 40 the main drivers in the rule being stability (and so righting moment), length, beam, draft, sail area, displacement and a limitation on construc- tion materials aimed at limiting cost. Changes in the racecourses for the class’s primary target events and the demise of the ‘Transat Anglais’, along with a class rule that has morphed to allow
Code 0s, rotating bowsprits and ever lighter rigs have resulted in more powerful, faster designs in recent years. Changes have also been driven to a certain extent by competitors accepting a higher entry level cost for construction. Although this hasn’t resulted in a full-on ‘arms race’ as such (production boats still represent by far the greatest slice of the fleet), there’s no doubt the nature of the class has changed from the racer-cruisers that we were designing in 2005/2006 to the very much full-on inshore/offshore racing yachts of today. In Europe, for the production Class 40 builders and designers like ourselves who develop custom and semi-custom boats almost all of our focus has been on the big transatlantic events: Transat Jacques Vabres, Route du Rhum, Route du Choco- lat and races such as the Les Sables-Horta- Les Sables. However, not every owner aspires to or has the time to double-hand (never mind race the Rhum) across the Atlantic and for many Class 40 owners, particularly amateurs or those sailing with pro or semi-pro co-skippers, the longest races they’ll take part in are the Fastnet, Normandy Channel, Round Britain or ‘fully crewed’ RORC-type events. In North America the longest courses are in the range of 600 miles, often less, and the weather matrices are very different
SEAHORSE 39
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