The 1980 Cup Match and Dennis Conner’s Freedom keeps tight rein on Alan Bond’s Australia at the start of race 1. As Conner found to his cost three years later, Freedom proving a humbling trial-horse for Valentijn’s ponderous Liberty; Freedom was one of the best conventional 12s ever – and with her low freeboards the prettiest. But even in 1980 Conner needed everything he had; by the time of the Match Australia had added 100sqft of unmeasured sail plus this nice elliptical tip (inset). Alan Bond’s team had watched the British try a flexi-topmast, but Ben Lexcen quickly drew up a much more sophisticated version to take on Freedom. Conner won the 1980 Match 4-1, but for Bond’s third challenge this time Jim Hardy and his Aussie Battlers had made Conner’s men work hard for it
of sail you think we need, whatever you think is best for the boats. You build it and I’ll pay you full whack. Just build whatever you think will do the best job for us.” We decided to start with a spinnaker… When he came back we tested spinnakers ad nauseum and, sure enough, our Sobstad spinnaker was faster. So that opened the door for me to build a fair number of Sobstad sails for the Freedom programme. ‘Dennis was also always very respectful
of the fact that I had a family and a job. And that was nice of him. Everybody else who was trying to make the team had to do quite a bit more so I was very fortunate he respected me enough that I didn’t need to do all that. Then in the autumn I moved to being on Dennis’s boat and we made Jack Sutphen the trial skipper.’ Dennis and Freedom in 1980 was the
first professional Cup project and the final result showed it, going 4-0 against what was a pretty good Australian package. ‘For the 1983 defence our plan was to
do two new boats and trial them against each other. We already had two decent boats, Freedom and Enterprise, for a comparison. We suspected the Australians would be competitive and planning to do something special following their clever bendy rig in 1980. ‘Don’t forget the Americans had won for
ever and the foreigners were predisposed to losing, which may not be fair, but I think it
50 SEAHORSE
was realistic. We thought if we designed and built two new boats that we would have the landscape pretty well covered. ‘We decided to have Johan Valentijn
design one boat and Olin Stephens and his Sparkman & Stephens office design the other. The Valentijn boat ironically would not have been able to race in the Cup because it was too short on the waterline and didn’t fit the rule! For the S&S boat Olin was getting older so some others of the S&S team were involved including Bill Langan. They designed a fairly large boat. Normally a large boat would struggle for enough sail area, but they managed it by pushing the girth profile pretty hard to gain back some rating under the rule. ‘As an aside, I was working out yester-
day and in anticipation of our conversation looking at the 12 Metre models I have in my workout room. And that boat in partic- ular, it just looked very different from any of the other 12s Olin had designed. It pushed the girth rule hard. It was large and the reason it did not have a smaller sail area was because the girths were not penalised. ‘It was also very V-shaped and not very
wine bottle shaped. You would think that configuration would be slow, but it needed to be that way under the rule to get a big boat with a big sail area. ‘But then we tested it against Freedom
and Enterprise and rapidly realised the design did not work well at all. So now we
needed to build another boat, or rely on Freedom to be good enough. We went for another boat, Liberty, based upon some of the ideas that Johan had shown with his previous Magic. And so we let him do it. ‘Liberty was not a great boat. The first
day we sailed Freedom against Liberty… Well, I hate to go swimming, but I said I would go swimming because there must be something stuck on Liberty to be this slow against the older boat. So that did not bode very well for our future… ‘We decided we would also let Johan
make changes to Freedom, because she was sticky in the light and we thought that would improve with more sail area. We’d decided that we would let him make Freedom a little shorter so we could add sail area. However, Freedom had the low- est freeboard of any 12 Metre but that had been grandfathered after the rule on free- board was changed in 1983. So Freedom had low freeboard and was quite wet, but it was the low freeboard that gave her better aero and hydrodynamic qualities, plus extra stability from a lower deck. ‘Unfortunately Johan did not interpret
the rule correctly, so in making Freedom shorter to gain sail area we lost the grand- fathering of the freeboard. We had ended up with a shorter boat and without any additional sail area.’ Freedom was now worse in light air, with no added sail area, and worse in
JONATHAN EASTLAND/ALAMY
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