A moment to reflect
For some 30 years Tim Jeffery has been foremost among the observers of and enthusiasts for the America’s Cup. As the latest AC teams settle into life in Bermuda, and look forward to the first ever quasi one-design Match, he looks at the gestation of the new America’s Cup establishment
34 SEAHORSE
You can thank a green 1956 Ford Zephyr parked overlooking an estuary on New Zealand’s Coromandel peninsula for the current generation of foiling catamarans. Keeping cars serviceable beyond a useful life is a bit of a Kiwi speciality and this car was used to store the gubbins needed to run races for the Mercury Bay Boating Club. The joke in 1987, when the MBBC became known to the wider world, was that the Zephyr was also the club’s ‘clubhouse’.
When Sir Michael Fay launched his surprise challenge in 1987 for a Deed of Gift match (requiring the single-masted yachts to be no more than 90ft LWL), some felt it was the end of the age of inno- cence in the America’s Cup. It was a cynical and manipulative attempt to push all other challengers aside and go straight to the match against the defender – none other than Dennis Conner on behalf of the San Diego Yacht Club.
Well, innocence and the America’s Cup
have never been bedfellows. Besides the heated arguments and harsh words that flowed between the Fay and Conner camps there was always the image of that Ford Zephyr. Fay’s PR wrangler, the very effective Peter Debreceney, laid on a press trip to visit the now famous car. The small Kiwi battlers versus Big Bad Dennis was the carefully crafted message.
was bolted on downwind. She was kept upright by a deep keel, a monster lead bulb and a crew of 30 dancing across the sweep of the deck wings which
For all that the 1988 America’s Cup was carted back and forth through the New York courts, it did produce two superb yachts. On the one hand, KZ-1 was the most extraordinary inshore monohull since the Cup boats before and after WWI. She manifested Bruce Farr’s and Russell Bowler’s idea for a high-speed monohull: long at 120ft, thanks to her substantial bowsprit; massively powerful thanks to an upwind 627m2 1,000m2
sail area, to which another
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