Update
LESSONS FROM 2013, RACING IN 2017 – Jack Griffin
What lessons from the racing in San Francisco in 2013 will help the six America’s Cup teams be ready in Bermuda in 2017? We can expect the conditions on the Great Sound to be more varied than San Francisco Bay, both in wind direction and strength. Nevertheless, over the 19 races of the 2013 America’s Cup we saw light-air days with big shifts as well as the usual strong sea breeze. In the infamous Race 13, when time ran out with New Zealand far ahead and less than a mile from the finish, the boats struggled to fly a hull, much less to get up on their foils. Two days later, in both Races 14 and 15, in conditions strong enough to leave the gennakers on the dock, the Kiwis were eating into Oracle’s lead on each of the second downwind legs when they sailed into light patches and Oracle stretched out again for the two wins. The San Francisco conditions provided plenty of variety and the racing offers several useful lessons.
Clearly, getting up on foils in transition conditions pays off handsomely. By Race 15 in San Francisco Oracle was able to foil upwind in 15kt true wind speed. All the teams expect to foil upwind in 2017. Lifting off before your competitor in marginal conditions will be a weapon. The teams are allowed a total of four boards – two sets – on their AC Class raceboats. So moding the boat for the day will now include choosing light-air or heavy-air daggerboards, trading off lift, drag and stability.
Midway through the 2013 match Oracle improved their wing controls to allow them to mode the wing between races. Expect all the teams to have the ability to mode their wings for the conditions in Bermuda. Oracle also developed their beast mode, to enable upwind foiling, with six of the eight grinders providing constant hydraulic power to allow the wing trimmer to aggressively ease and trim the wing. Team New Zealand sailed wider upwind angles to build speed and enable their skimming mode. Oracle then combined wider angles and beast mode to foil upwind but the Kiwis were only able to foil upwind in the last few races.
Once you’re going fast, where are the passing opportunities? In San Francisco 15 of the 17 lead changes came on the single upwind leg in each of the 19 races. In the entire regatta there was only one lead change after the windward gate, in Race 10, and there were no lead changes at all on the final reach to the finish. Whether the conditions and tighter racecourse in Bermuda will offer downwind passing opportunities remains to be seen. We can imagine that the coaches are working out scenarios and that the teams with the luxury of two-boat testing – Oracle and Artemis for now – will be experimenting with those scenarios. By the time racing starts on 27 May 2017, everyone should have their playbooks worked out. One tactic we will see very consistently is splitting at the gate,
Sir
Nice piece on the Bermuda Race by John Rousmaniere (April 2016). For interest, Noryema VIII, for thus it was, was and the last time I checked still is the only non-American yacht to win the Lighthouse Trophy.
The win generated extraordinary coverage in SportsIllustrated magazine with a cover photo and a centre spread of Noryema soon after the start. The owner, the late Ron Amey, was not aboard due to pressing takeover business, and the late much loved Teddy Hicks, standing with his leg on the pushpit in your photo, led the team. RBYC on the transom is, by the way, the Royal Burnham Yacht Club in Essex and not Bermuda! The building sequence went on to the Frers-designed Noryema
Xwhich was in the winning 1975 Admiral’s Cup team when that event still had its world championship status. She went on to race the 1975/76 Southern Cross Cup and Sydney Hobart with a respectable top-10 finish but that was the last of Ron Amey’s racing dynasty, one that had done so much for the standing of the RORC and the development of our offshore racing prowess in the 1960s and 1970s.
Paul Antrobus, navigator, Noryema VIII 10 SEAHORSE
particularly the downwind gate. Precise, confident boathandling will be the enabler here. In some races we’ll see a team trade off distance lost in a tack or a gybe against the tactical gain to be had by setting up to round the mark they want. We’ll also see some bold, last-second moves like the one Oracle pulled at the first leeward gate in Race 13 in San Francisco, gybing right in front of New Zealand instead of carrying on to the left gate mark. Ben Ainslie, Oracle’s tactician, describes it: ‘It was clearly a tricky spot because there was a big right-hand shift coming to that gate and we weren’t 100 per cent sure whether Dean and the guys were going to lay the left gate or not. But as soon as they gybed, we made that split-second decision to gybe too, and they would then have to follow us to the right gate, or take another gybe back to the left and we’d be in sync with the shift on the right tack. But we were obviously waiting to see what their move was before we made that final choice… it was a last second thing that went well.’ One more lesson from the 2013 America’s Cup Match: in 19 races neither team was penalised for an unforced error – entering the start box early, being OCS or going out of bounds. All the teams will want to emulate that next year.
BENJ!
At the St Thomas International Regatta this year another former Fireball World Champion, Bob Fisher, caught up with his old friend Steve Benjamin, racing his TP52 Spookie, and put it to him that it had been some journey, 40 years in fact, since those days racing dinghies… ‘I guess there have been quite a lot of changes since I gave up Fireball sailing! As you know, the first Fireball campaign was in 1976, and I followed in your footsteps for the world championship win in Halifax, Nova Scotia with Tucker Edmondson. The following year in Kinsale the two of us won a second world title. During those years I was also campaigning the 470 for the Olympics and in 1980 Neal Fowler and I won the US Olympic trials.
‘Of course that was “the year” when the Carter administration instructed we boycott the Olympics because of the war with Afghanistan. But the US Olympic Committee did say that as we were not going to the Olympics we could go to any other regatta we wanted, so we elected to go to Kiel Week in the 470 and then I joined Tucker for the 505 Worlds at Hayling Island, which we won. ‘The following year was the beginning of a new four-year campaign for the 1984 Olympics, with my new crew Chris Steinfeld. We headed to Quiberon, France and finished second in the world championship, which was actually the best we ever managed in the 470 Worlds. We carried on through 1984 when we won the trials again but this time we did go to the Olympics, in Long Beach. We were going pretty well until race 5, which we won, but there was no gun because we were OCS… It was a tough fight to get back on the podium but we ended up second to Luis Doreste and took the silver medal. ‘Around that time, in 1983, I sailed my first Admiral’s Cup on a Holland 40 by the name of Shenandoahwith Bill Palmer, and that was the first of five Admiral’s Cups. As well as the Fastnet, we also had lots of great inshore racing in the Solent over the years. ‘More recently my wife Heidi and I started with our own big boat. Our first offshore boat was High Noon, a Tripp 41, which we bought in 2005 – just last week we donated it – and the next boat was the Carkeek 40 Spookie, which was really Spookie 2. Spookie1 was a boat that Heidi’s grandfather had given to her father for being admitted to Harvard in 1948. Then we sold Spookie 2to a Japanese client and bought Spookie 3, a TP52. And here we are in St Thomas!’ Alongside the TP52 Benj is also racing Etchells. ‘We started the
Etchells campaign two years ago. We were invited to borrow a boat by Tom Lihan and we happened to do OK in the Coral Reef Regatta, taking fifth – and the top boat not already qualified for the worlds. So we said, “OK, so maybe we should go to the worlds.” I bought a boat and we went to the Newport worlds, but it was one of those disappointing events and we finished 24th. So we said, ‘OK, we
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 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76