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A very different boat… nearly a year in the shed has seen the slender but relatively conventional maxi Nicorette emerge as the largest application of DSS technology to date. This is the renamed CQS on her first sail in New Zealand, showing off one of – if not the – largest foretriangle seen on a modern race yacht. The prospect of racing this long and narrow machine, but now with mountains of extra righting moment, to Hobart on Boxing Day even tempted Chris Dickson away from a busy retirement counting his properties


Function not fashion


The extraordinary DSS driven reshaping of the original Simonis Voogd maxi Nicorette by Brett Bakewell-White was only motivated by pursuit of performance... not drama


Two years ago veteran ocean racer Ludde Ingvall stood alongside his cousin, Sir Michael Hintze, in Sydney and watched the new 100ft maxi Comanche blast down the harbour at the start of the Sydney Hobart race.


Sir Michael, whose CQS hedge fund is one of the best-known in Britain, was so inspired by the sight that he voiced an ambition to have a go at something similar himself. And so began the extraordinary rebirth of the 90ft racing yacht that Ludde skippered to line honours in the 2004 Sydney Hobart as Nicorette. Through a comprehensive redesign plus very exten- sive surgery, the yacht has now been trans- formed into a modern 98ft maxi in time to


realise Sir Michael’s ambition in the 2016 edition of Australia’s classic ocean race. The original boat was designed by Alex Simonis and Maarten Voogd at that par- ticular time when the Sydney Hobart rule set the size limit at 30m (98ft) and imposed an IRC rating limit of 1.61.


The hull form was slender and slab-sided, similar in many respects to and possibly inspired by the International America’s Cup Class yachts of the time, but with a canting keel. Boats designed at that time with that rule in mind were rendered almost instantly obsolete when the Hobart rule was changed to remove the IRC restriction and increase the size limit to 100ft. Such are the vagaries and frustrations of design rules.


Also competing in the same Sydney Hobart and burdened with the same restric- tions was the Bakewell-White designed Konica Minolta, which itself looked set to take line honours only to be forced to retire when it suffered structural damage in big seas off the Tasman coast. Nicorette swept past to glory.


Bakewell-White Yacht Design was sub- sequently commissioned to transform Konica Minolta into a 100ft fixed-keel, manually powered maxi with the express


purpose of winning the Barn Door trophy in the Transpac Race, which it duly achieved on its first outing.


When Ludde Ingvall set about similarly modernising Nicorette, he logically turned first to its original designers, but they were fully committed to a another big project and could not take on the commission. The logical next step was to approach Brett Bakewell-White to take up the chal- lenge. Two rival Sydney Hobart camps from a dozen years ago were thus reunited in a common cause – although Bakewell- White confesses the union reawakened all the heartbreak of seeing that 2004 Sydney Hobart victory slip away with the Der- went River finish line oh so close. Having banished those demons, he set to work. ‘We were fortunate in that these pro- jects often proceed when the original designers have died, or the drawings no longer exist and you are left flying blind,’ says Bakewell-White. ‘Although Simonis Voogd were unable to do the project they were very good about supplying informa- tion about the original design, so we were able to proceed from a known position.’ The first step was to provide a feasibility study with three options. One was to


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