Steve Clark’s Cogito held onto the Little America’s Cup for over 10 years in undeveloped form – a deliberate choice on Clark’s part ‘pour encourager les autres’. It was not until 2007 that Cogito finally ceded the trophy to the fast Canadian team of Fred Eaton and Magnus Clarke. But Clark was back with a new C-Class (above) for the 2010 event in Newport, Aethon, which showed all the signs of being a worthy successor to its era-defining predecessor before being badly damaged prior to the series in a high-speed capsize. Right: hotbed of design ingenuity… standing with the tiller of France’s 2010 C-Class challenger is a young Antoine Koch, champion Imoca sailor and the designer who, working with Groupe Finot, produced Yoann Richomme’s Vendée Globe runner-up Arkéa Paprec
Finn business was that every four years you got a chance to build 40 boats. We spent eight months of the year without any debt; we didn’t make any money on the boats, but we made a f*ck load of money on not having any debt, right?’ But four years later ‘we realised that
Atlanta was not going to buy boats.’ And, he claims, what was then called ISAF didn’t want a dominant builder. Even though ‘they always are going to have a dominant builder, because Olympians are going to follow each other like lemmings. ‘That’s why Marstrøm was going to
build all the Tornados, and Vanguard was going to build all the Finns. Now, stupidly, Larry Lemieux and Luca Devoti decided they wanted a chunk of our 50-boat-a- year market. The second they decided they wanted to compete with us we stopped. OK, fine, have at it, because there’s not enough money in this to fight over it.’ Vanguard also built Europe dinghies (an
Olympic class from 1992 to 2004). Their design started with a Winner because ‘it seemed to be a fine boat. Added a little Bondo to make a bunch of minor cosmetic adjustments: crisped up the radiuses on the back corners; changed the stem profile to make the point on the bow sharper… ‘We knew we could do a better struc-
tural job, so we used thin Klegecell and cloth and vacuum-bagged the whole deck. Europe dinghies that you could stand on!’ Design-wise the Vanguard Europe was
the same boat as the Winner, he repeats… yet ‘the boat could not go downwind in more than 12kt of breeze.’ (‘I thought that was just me!’ I reply, glad to have a new excuse for my dismal Europe results.) Discouraged by the Olympic chase,
Steve pulled the moulds for the Vanguard 15 out of storage and created a brand-new
44 SEAHORSE
class that would keep many college sailors racing dinghies long after graduation. ‘I was Vanguard’s executive chef,’ he says; ‘I let the other people run the company while I actually figured out what the boats were.’ Vanguard also built the Club 420,
which was designed ‘to teach people to go out on trapezes and set spinnakers’, as a stepping stone to the 470. Instead, ‘the Club 420 turns out to be the largest national trapeze sailing class – and I’m enormously proud of that. But you’re done at the end,’ he adds; ‘the road stops and nobody goes anywhere else. The way it panned out isn’t the way I expected.’
Highlights Steve owned Vanguard for 30 years. ‘I did the Nomad, which was a pretty successful family day sailor.’ Next, he spent two years working up the Vector: an unbreakable double-trapeze boat, with ‘strings to pull that actually do something’. Though he ‘got to a pretty good answer, fact is no one wanted that boat; we sold exactly one.’ Too expensive, he says. ‘If you get over $10,000 you’re not going to sell anything.’ When I ask what he considers the high-
light of his Vanguard career Steve smiles and quips, ‘Selling it.’ (Laser Performance took it over in 2008.) But he quickly adds what he calls the real ‘high part of it: making money building boats, actually running a profitable company’. That came after the 1997 purchase of
Laser/Sunfish. ‘At that point we had a large enough organisation that was well enough managed that we were reliably profitable. Essentially the thing you had to do was support the cuckoo, which was the Laser. It would suck up every dollar you would let it suck up.’ Instead of budgeting ‘$180,000 to promote the Vector, I said
give me $180,000 and I’ll add 25 per cent to the Laser business.’ Time for another rhetorical question:
why not stop building everything else and just build Lasers and Sunfish? After all, ‘The more Lasers and Sunfish you built the more profitable you were.’ But of course that would have been far too boring a plan for a Renaissance man. As for Steve, ‘I wanted to sail 505s and
International Canoes; boats that fxx!ing went places. But we couldn’t sell those things because people didn’t know how to sail them.’ Selling the company allowed a return to his passion: building and modify- ing whatever fast boat caught his eye.
The end of the road In 2010 the Little America’s Cup came to Newport. Steve built a new boat, Aethon, which he sailed with his nephew Oliver Moore. In all, seven boats from four coun- tries showed up; impressive for a develop- ment class so leading edge that the Amer- ica’s Cup teams were sniffing around the boat park. As Steve said before the regatta, ‘Just getting a [C-Class] to the regatta and competing is a significant achievement.’ Unfortunately a ‘freak accident’ before
the first race damaged their wing so badly they had to withdraw. (‘Please don’t include that fxx!ing photo of the boat on its side,’ Steve will beg me later; ‘I still have PTSD from that crash…’ Oops – ed.) And that was, as he puts it, ‘the end of
the road for super high-end one-off racing boats. There wasn’t going to be another project as good as that one. And for a long, long time we were sitting there, going, what the fxxk do we do now? The boat broke; no one’s gonna ask me to build anything. And I’ve got a payroll, so I need a new model.’
CHRISTOPHE LAUNAY/DPPI
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