Design
Bang up to date
Umberto Felci and a highly respected engineering and build team have created an all-new Flying Dutchman for this ‘design-led’ former Olympic class… collecting a world title first time out
BACKGROUND
The International Flying Dutchman class has always been a hotbed of design and build innovation, never more so than when it was an Olympic class up to 1992. While the class is best known for the design fables that characterised its Olympic history, involving names such as Rodney Pattisson, Alejandro Abascal, the Diesch and Pajot brothers and skipper-designer- builder Jo Richards, like the Star boat, the class has remained very active and com - petitive since losing its five-ring status. Back in its Olympic heyday the FD’s generous hull tolerances, since slightly tightened, encouraged vigorous experi- mentation and development. Jo Richards famously created the first composite aluminium honeycomb boat in 1983 – probably showing his hand a year too soon by dominating the 1983 Los Angeles pre-Olympics… Come the 1984 Games and several rival skippers had taken his ideas and pushed them a little further, relegating Richards – a brilliant instinctive designer – to the bronze medal. Before Richards, of course, we had the Pattisson era when the stories came thick
44 SEAHORSE
and fast. In the early 1970s, when FDs were still measured using split templates (with very generous tolerances), Pattisson took two identical Bob Hoare boats to Spain along with a large supply of microballoons and undertook nearly four months of two-boat design testing at full scale (exactly as Alinghi did in the Cup 30 years later). The result was a very quick new design, but one that was sadly soon ruled out of class when the FDs switched to one-piece measurement templates. Pattisson then helped his builder, Bob Hoare, create a new-shape plug to the new rule. However, the first – exquisitely built – boat ‘off the mould’ in spring 1972 was deemed by its skipper as slow. With barely a few weeks left until the Kiel Olympic Regatta, Pattisson helped Hoare tweak his old plug to the rule changes and with every- one available pulled onto the project a new boat was thrown together in little more than a fortnight. The result was FD K-263 and a second Olympic gold medal in Germany. Several leading designers have since studied FD development to improve their understanding of the effect of minor shape changes. One immensely technical study by Dutch hydrodynamicists Peter Hinrichsen and Durk Zandstra analysed every successful FD shape between 1968 and 2010; they discovered that Pattisson’s 1972 gold medal-winning design, created more through instinct than science, indeed demonstrated the full bow and narrow waterlines of many of today’s best boats. Their overall conclusion about this 1972 fast-tracked cold-moulded speedster was as follows: ‘The shape of K-263 was clearly very fast but even by today’s standards it is also extremely complex…’ Not a bad effort for 45 years ago.
The PlanaTech FD DESIGN
– Umberto Felci & Lorenzo Giovannozzi The project commissioned by composite specialists PlanaTech for a new FD led us to examine carefully both the rules of this historic one-design class and the steady evolution of the FD hull over the years since the class first appeared in the 1950s. Our new hull was developed taking maximum advantage of the current class rules, which even for new boats provide tolerances that we can still call ‘generous’. Originally even larger tolerances were nec- essary to permit a variety of construction methods that all delivered slightly different hull shapes – these have been tightened for post-1981 boats but they remain ‘roomy’. For many years, going back to the famous gold medal-winning cold-moulded boats from builders such as Bob Hoare in the UK and Hein in Germany, the best FDs came from yards that tried to exploit these variations to improve performance. But today, thanks to 3D modelling, allied with CAD-CAM processes for the construction of plugs and moulds, we had a possibility of really optimising the hull and creating an innovative – and fast – new shape. The possibility of modifying the curve of the keel line, compared to the rule-refer- ence profile, allowed us to make changes from existing designs that delivered impor- tant improvements in the longitudinal distribution of volume. This first variation was crucial for the development of the new hull because it relates to many other factors that have an important influence on the resistance of the hull at various speeds. Class rules define six hull stations to control the line of the keel, one of which represents the transom, at which the keel
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