When boat names were easy
Terrorist, quite a boat name to conjure with these days. But back in 1974 a certain yacht designer by the name of Bruce King produced a radical One Tonner christened Terrorist… and the effect on the top echelons of the IOR racing establishment was, to all intents and purposes, like a bomb going off. Julian Everitt looks at one of his favourite designs of the early IOR era
I’m going to kick off this appraisal of a particular style of offshore racing boat with an apology, to all of the countless other innovative creations that blossomed throughout the IOR period from 1970 until 1994. But this piece is primarily about the evolution of unballasted foils and their impact on the offshore yacht racing world. So here we are. Back to Terrorist. In performance poten-
tial she was, perhaps, the greatest One Tonner of all time. And arguably the most under-appreciated racing boat ever. Having sailed across the Atlantic, from
Florida, where she was built in aluminium by Sparcraft, to take part in the event, she hit the ground running from the start of the first race of the 1974 One Ton Cup in Torbay. It was blowing around 12kt. There were 40-odd boats all making the
kind of start you would expect in a super- competitive world championship. Terrorist’s silver bow appeared out of the middle of the
46 SEAHORSE
line. Little bias one way or the other. She was two minutes ahead of the next boat by the first mark and went on to win that race by over six minutes! Sadly, after that her campaign went a little awry. A huge wind shift on the first leg of race two sent her from the front to the back, then she was dis- masted in the middle-distance offshore race. But while few designers or owners recog-
nised her potential, Terrorist had immedi- ately scared the living daylights out of IOR rulemakers who, only four years into their ‘project’, that began in 1970, saw a real revolution upsetting the status quo. Poten- tially crippling bilgeboard penalties were intentionally applied and the hope, in the IOR rulemakers’ minds, was that the concept would be effectively killed off before causing any more trouble. The design was undoubtedly a truly
original piece of thinking under the IOR. To add weight to the significance of this, the Terrorist legacy continues today. Virtu- ally every Imoca 60, Volvo 70, Mini 650 as well as innumerable contemporary IRC raceboats, from the 100-footers down, owe the development and indeed the very idea of asymmetric boards, however employed, to this amazing Bruce King design. It was another pioneering yacht
designer, the Dutchman Ricus van de Stadt, who first saw the potential of twin asymmetric bilgeboards in a design of his launched in 1952. Van de Stadt’s creation also featured twin rudders – a feature that would take another 50 years to become
mainstream. But then, so far ahead of the game was this genius, that Zeevalk, a 40-footer of his design racing in the 1951 Fastnet, featured a single spade rudder. Another concept that took until 1966 to become mainstream, fashionable or indeed widely acceptable in offshore racing yacht design. Then there was Uffa Fox, with his own Atalanta design in the late 1950s… Certainly, the exploitation of the poten-
tial of multiple foils can be traced right back to the Herreshoff era. But Terrorist was the complete package – exploiting the level playing field provided by the bur- geoning IOR, with retractable asymmetric foils, internal ballast and a much lighter displacement than normally found on an IOR boat of the period. Since the International Offshore Rule was
released in 1970, ostensibly to bring about racing harmony across the world, with a rating system that endeavoured to bring about a fair system of equating boat perfor- mance across multiple sizes, what also transpired was a fiercely competitive game- changing interest in racing offshore yachts against each other that all rated the same. While the most famous of all these
‘classes’ – competing for the One Ton Cup – had been resurrected in 1965 to promote level racing in offshore boats under the RORC measurement rule, which proved to be an immediate success, the concept of boat-for-boat racing really took off in 1970 when the IOR measurement system was first gaining international traction.
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