Winner takes all
It is often stated that the America’s Cup is won by the faster boat. Nevertheless, there have been a few exceptions, but then again it is the winner who writes the history. Dave Hollom suggests a few instances where the slower boat won, or rather the faster boat lost…
This state of affairs has existed since the inception of the competition. The story of the schooner America’s victory, in a race around the Isle of Wight in 1851, is well known. Less known is the fact that the second-placed boat was a British cutter, Aurora, which had a tonnage (the method of rating boats in that era) of 84 tons against 170 tons for America and which came home only eight minutes behind in a race that lasted over 10 hours. Yes, America won and under the rules
of the competition, which was first past the post, she was thus the faster boat. But in yacht design bigger is invariably faster, that’s why we have handicap rules, so all the stories about how her speed was due to her cotton sails or her hollow waterlines in the bow are rubbish.
52 SEAHORSE
America won, quite simply, because she
was larger. Under any sensible handicap rule Aurora would have won by a country mile so perhaps, excluding the fact that there may well have been even smaller boats than Aurora who, on handicap, may well have beaten both, the fastest boat for her size was Aurora. And so the myth of America’s invincibility and the further myth, that at that time American yacht design was ahead of British yacht design, continues to this day. Moving forward to the match of 1934
between Thomas Sopwith’s Endeavour and Harold Vanderbilt’s Rainbow is another example of the, generally consid- ered, slower boat winning. Endeavour was Sopwith’s third America’s Cup boat and his second to the newly adopted J-class Rule, used for the first time in the previous challenge of 1930, from the board of Charles Nicholson. Rainbow was Starling Burgess’s second America’s Cup boat, both of which were to the Universal J-class Rule. The J-class Rule was an American
creation, devised primarily by the great Nathanael G Herreshoff and adopted in 1929 for international competition in boats that rated 14.5m and above, boats smaller than this racing under the Euro- pean-inspired International Rule of 1907. Like Dixon Kemp’s length and sail area rule of 1887 and the USA Seawanhaka Rule of the same year, it traded length against sail area but also, as a denominator in the formula, it included displacement.
Universal Rule (1902-1939) Rating in feet = 0.18*L*S0.5
/D0.333
Where L is quarter-beam length measured in feet at a height of one-tenth of the waterline beam (one-eighth in the J class) above the waterline, S is sail area measured in square feet and D is displacement measured in cubic feet. The rating is not a waterline or overall
length, just a number that the product of the formula must not exceed. Waterline length varied between 76ft and 87ft but the length used in the measurement for- mula is Quarter Beam Length. This mea- surement was to reflect the influence of overhangs on the actual sailing length in the same way that bow and stern girth measurements reflect the effect of over- hangs on length in the International Rule. The rule has one weak point which
designers eventually but not initially exploited. This was that sail area need not be sacrificed for length as long as the increase in length was achieved with a suitable rise in displacement. Being a cubic measurement in the formula, as long as displacement went up in proportion to length, so that the displacement length ratio or volume coefficient remained the same, sail area was unaffected. So you could have a longer boat with the same sail area and, due to the greater weight, greater stability or sail-carrying power and with lines no courser than a shorter but lighter boat with the same sail area. Other than at low speeds, when viscous
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