Look closely
The technical level is already up there but development continues in two of the most important high-performance classes – it’s just become a bit more subtle... Andy Rice
Two of the most high-performance development dinghy classes contested their world championships in Australia at the start of the year. On one side of Port Phillip Bay, south of Melbourne, it was the International 14s racing out of Geelong, and on the other side of the bay the International Moths at Sorrento. The Antipodeans proved they remain the dominant force in Moth racing, while the Brits owned the 14 championships. New Zealand wunderkind Pete Burling took the Moth world title away from his 49er arch-rival Nathan Outteridge, break- ing the Aussie stranglehold on the class with some devastating speed downwind. Burling has been in the class for the best part of five years but hasn’t made much of
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an international impact since an impressive debut at the 2010 worlds in Belmont, Australia, when he came fourth. ‘Yeah, that was pretty good,’ says Burling, ‘but then I missed the 2012 worlds in Garda because it was a week after London 2012 and we were on a medal tour. The 2013 worlds in Hawaii, well, that didn’t go too well. I was expecting some nice trade winds for the week, and it was light. I just had my small foil and couldn’t get up on the foils as early as I needed to.’ Burling missed last year’s worlds in the UK, a light-airs event won by Nathan Out- teridge, but did manage some training in New Zealand in the build-up to Sorrento. Burling’s kit was all pretty standard Mach 2 stuff. ‘I don’t have the time for much development work,’ says Burling, ‘A-Mac [Mach 2 designer Andrew McDougall] and I have a very good relationship…’ So the worlds-winning gear was a Mach 2 hull, a KA-MSL 16.3 sail on a medium mast but, unlike in Hawaii, a quiver of three Mach 2 foils. ‘I wasn’t going to get caught out again,’ says Burling. ‘So I had three separate foils all ready to go on their own verticals.’ Most Moth sailors don’t run to the luxury of having separate vertical struts, but put different-sized horizontal
foils on their centreboard strut. It might only take a few minutes to change one out for another, but Burling felt it was worth the extra expense of having three ready-to- wear foils sitting on the beach. ‘It probably gave me another six or seven minutes to decide which foil to use for the day, and I never made a bad selection. I was always on the foil I needed to be on. Then again, the wind in Sorrento was either on or off, so it wasn’t that difficult a choice.’ Burling had a large foil for light to medium airs, and two small foils for medium to heavy, with one optimised for flat water, the other for choppy. If there was any doubt as to which foil to use for the day, Burling says his default would have been one of the small ones, paying the potential price of later take-off for higher- end top speed due to the lower drag of the smaller surface area.
Burling was using a curved, anhedral foil on the rudder, a design that is starting to become increasingly commonplace. Former world champion Simon Payne, who also markets the Mach 2, explains the concept of having downward curving tips on the rudder foil. ‘One of the reasons is the leeward tip doesn’t come out, which is slow if it does. But the main reason is that
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