Update
Team Dongfeng skipper Charles Caudrelier hangs on tight as he drives his Chinese-entered VO65 upwind at the start of the Cape Town In-Port race. Though the in-port and pro-am races are mandatory they now only count in the main scoring as potential tie-breaks
NEW BAT NEW BALLS
– Ian Walker, Abu Dhabi Ocean Racing Seahorse: Ian, you have done two round- the-world races where you have been able to design and build your own boat, but now you are in a one-design race where you are given what you are given. What do you miss about the old era? Ian Walker: I think for everybody who has come from the Volvo 70 era you miss the performance of the boat, you miss the fact you can make things how you want them. With one-design you have to live with what you have. It was a very frustrating process early on, because your natural reaction as an experienced offshore sailor is to create a massive long list of everything you want to change.
We have changed a bunch of things through the agreement of teams and measurers, so we have made improvements, but of course many other things will stay as they are. Obviously that’s the price you pay, but the benefit is huge in terms of being in a much better race and not having the concerns about whether your boat will be slow. For me personally, I’ve had a couple of very tough races where we haven’t got the design or build right. So now it’s like a breath of fresh air. SH: So in the ‘bad old days’ with a slow boat, what was it like waiting to see the latest sked? IW: I think what was very difficult – particularly if you are skipper or CEO of a team – is you can’t give up on it. So you don’t want to believe the boat is slow or that there’s stuff you can’t change. In the old, old days you could change stuff. The last race was the worst possible scenario because the rules stopped you from changing things like daggerboards, doing things that might improve your boat. So you were lumped with it; what you had was what you had, and you had to drag it around the world. But you also had to keep the team motivated, make everybody believe they could still win – otherwise you really do have no chance.
That’s what created the pressure, the fact that you try to make everyone believe you can still win and ‘we can still change things, we can change the sails, and so on’. You analyse everything to
8 SEAHORSE
death and deep down you slowly realise that actually you are fighting a losing battle. It comes in stages, because you convince yourself you’re OK in some wind strengths, and sometimes you are. You might be alright in light winds and not in a breeze, or whatever. It takes quite a few legs to really understand where you are at. SH: In terms of understanding how you get the best out of the boat or how you slot in with the rest of the fleet? IW: I think both really. But even in the last race it wasn’t ever ‘over’ – even up until Brazil we still believed we were one of the quickest boats downwind. We believed that until we had the downwind leg to Brazil which was a massive kick in the guts...
That’s when we realised we hadn’t got anything in the locker, and that affects everything. It affects your decision-making and you have to start to take more risks if you want to win because you can’t do the same as everyone else or you will lose. And if you take more risks that maybe starts coming undone and then everyone says the navigator has got it wrong. Everything starts getting undermined, and unfairly so, to be honest. In the last race I think we had one of the best sailing teams but it all gets undermined, and it is quite a depressing experience.
This time around it is different; if you are slow, as we were some- times in the first leg – we got passed by Bruneland Dongfeng– you just have to look at yourself and look at what you are doing. You have to find ways of doing what you are doing better. SH: You’ve got a lot of new guys onboard compared with last time. Is that partly because you had to have a fresh start… IW: I’m not sure that’s fair. We have half of the team from the last race which I think is the right sort of number. We have got four of our eight sailors who did the last race and then we have freshened it up with a couple of different guys. Last time around if I could have hired Phil Harmer at the start of the programme I would have done. But he was already working for Groupama, so being a bit earlier this time enabled me to get my hands on some people who I couldn’t last time because we were the last team to get going. This time I really wanted to have somebody from each of the big teams from the last race – and in the early days when we were planning I spent a lot of time talking about what they thought had gone well or badly. ‘What would you do again?’ It could be about
GILLES MARTIN-RAGET
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