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As Rob Weiland often points out, it is not a lack of money that frustrates efforts to revive high-level international yacht racing – these are just some of the maxis that raced the 2016 Voiles de St Tropez under IRC. In no time at all the one-year-old Fast40+ class has also grown to 18 boats – just in the little old Solent – and these are now expensive, high-end programmes. Get the rule framework right and when top-level racing is made attractive again there are plenty of owners competitive enough and with the resources to jump in. There are only so many times a self-respecting businessman can tell himself that racing a sleek but slow 60-footer is the real deal
team must now rely on publicly available weather data; they cannot invest in exclusive proprietary data collection. On each race day the pressure is on the in-house weather gurus to interpret the available data to accurately predict, by early to mid-morning, the conditions they will race in in the afternoon.
Team CEO Grant Dalton says the development that is going into the AC50s would make the Bermuda boats unrecognisable from the AC72s in San Francisco: ‘This has nothing to do with yacht design as we know it. We only have one yacht designer in a team of 30 and he is actually doing engineering. It is all about the engi- neering. It is a new type of sailing and it suits the younger guys, the PlayStation generation. It really is like a giant PlayStation game.’ He predicts that the racing will seldom be close and much will depend on the conditions of the day and how the boat is configured. ‘If one boat gets it right and the other gets it wrong, one will go 6kt faster. Boats will do 28kt upwind. You can’t get a close race if one boat is doing 28kt upwind and the other one has the wrong foils.’ Although there are elements of one-design in the class, Dalton
said knowledgeable observers would look to differences in the daggerboards, the shape of the foils selected on the day, the length of the tips and the rudders.
Chief operating officer Kevin Shoebridge explained the teams could
build four racing daggerboards, with two removeable tips for each foil. ‘Getting the foil and tip combination right puts huge pressure on your weather man to come up with a decent forecast in the morning, because at 9am you are going to be making the call on what foil and tip to use when you race that afternoon. ‘But if you get it wrong it will have a very significant impact. If you put a board on with a small tip and then find you are racing in 8kt, you won’t be able to foil. You’ll be toast.’
Rudder set-up is similarly critical. Unlike in the previous Cup,
where rudders had to be pre-set at the dock with no ability to adjust them while sailing, the current generation allows 3° of movement during racing. ‘You still have to pre-set your global position according
14 SEAHORSE
to the conditions on the day and then, within that, you can have 3° of movement,’ said skipper Glenn Ashby.
‘In lighter conditions you set up for a bit more lift at the back and vice versa. It is another tool for performance. It is super-critical – 1mm of adjustment at the top of the rudder can make a huge difference to the boat. It is something that needs to be calibrated very closely all the time. It has a massive influence on performance.’ Ashby said stepping on to these boats was like stepping into a spaceship. The complex electronic and hydraulic control systems are now the heart of the boat. Basically, functions are split into three areas between six crew, one helming, one trimming and four grinding to produce hydraulic power – although the grinders also have to serve other functions during tacks and gybes. Huge development is being poured into systems that can efficiently convert a fixed amount of horsepower from the grinders into maximum hydraulic power, according to Ashby. The more power the grinders can direct to more onboard functions, the more accu- rately the boat can be sailed for better performance. ‘Sometimes you think you have enough hydraulic power and then suddenly you don’t. Even a 1-2kt increase in wind speed can make the boat almost unsailable if you don’t have your systems and set-up right.’ The athletic demands are enormous. Tacking, gybing and mark rounding are times of feverish action. Just when the greatest hydraulic demands are being made of the grinders, they also have to simultaneously help with other tasks. ‘You can’t just sail the boat with two people and leave the rest to the grinders,’ said Ashby. ‘During tacks and gybes there are lots of buttons to push and systems to set up. It must be well-orches- trated, especially on the foils. If somebody does the slightest thing wrong, or is out of position, you see wheelies and crashes.’ Straight-lining on the foils at close to 30kt upwind and more than
40kt downwind, flight control is primarily achieved through adjusting daggerboard rake. ‘Because the boards that we are using now are more unstable than what we had on the AC72s last time, a small
INGRID ABERY
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