Design
Plenty (more) to come
French designer Bernard Nivelt has always been good at interpreting the big picture. He created some of the best IOR designs of the era and was notable for nailing the upward drift of lighter, fractionally rigged designs from the smaller Quarter and Half Ton classes into bigger One Ton and Admiral’s Cup-sized yachts. Nivelt’s relatively light One Tonner Divawas the standout boat of the 1983 Admiral’s Cup and flagged the end of the masthead rigged racer. Similarly with the IRC rule – Nivelt’s A35 design for the now defunct Archam- bault Shipyard was both the most successful IRC boat of its time and the design that showed the way back from draggy bulb keel configurations to low-drag fins. Now Nivelt is pushing IRC towards faster, more offshore-oriented
yachts after another generation of ponderous upwind/downwind cruiser-racers. By the time Nivelt lost his longtime design partner, Michel Joubert, who passed away in 2016, the studio was focusing mainly on production designs. Now, with the introduction of new partner Alexis Muratet, the freshly renamed Nivelt-Muratet office is back in the raceboat game and the trophies are flowing nicely. Seahorse: Alexis, can you give us a little more background about how the partnership between you and Bernard came about? Alexis Muratet: Both being naval architects in La Rochelle, it was inevitable we would meet at some point. I think it was about 10 years ago, when Bernard introduced me into an America’s Cup project that ultimately fell through. Then three years ago he came to me saying that he was keen to collaborate as he would eventually like to ease back with his work. Actually, he is today 100 per cent fully involved… and getting more involved every day! SH: And your own background… AM: I graduated in Yacht and Powercraft Design at Southampton Institute in 2001, like so many of us! I then spent five years at Berret-Racoupeau before I teamed up with my friend Axel De Beaufort at Nacira Design. When the 2008 crisis hit it became very tough for us; we were both 30 at the time, so relative youngsters in the business and focusing on racing yachts. We had to look for other ways to earn money – in my case I helped to draft the ISO Standard for yachts, concentrating on structures and stability. I also did some naval architecture work for Couach motoryachts. SH: And your office today, how do you like to operate…
58 SEAHORSE
AM:We have deliberately stayed small or, as we describe it, we like to work like the ‘Alpine style’ of mountaineering. Nimble, light and fast, focusing on the design and outsourcing some of the numeric analysis like CFD to partners such as KND Performance. This allows us flexibility; we can work at night or at weekends if required and then go for sea trials or yard visits during the week while KND progress with some of the analysis. Of course this doesn’t leave enough time for our own sailing –
but maybe one day! But we don’t want a regular office with lots of draughtsmen, administrative demands and high overheads. This means we can go where we like with our work and not be forced to concentrate on production boats to pay the bills. SH: Bernard has a reputation for relying more on instinct and his vast experience than on dry science… AM: I have to say I disagree. We are both pretty scientific in our approach. Of course we use Bernard’s enormous IRC database, and to exploit this, to process and analyse the information it contains we have developed some quite complex spreadsheets with more than enough ratios and equations! Then we have our ‘TCC estimator tool’, which permits us to antic-
ipate the rating of a design without using up our allowance of trial certificates. This is still quite tricky – the IRC rule is secret and the equations are pretty complicated… more so than the critics of the system realise. Then we design the best possible boat within this TCC envelope using performance prediction tools, which range from simple calculations to full CFD and VPP work with KND and others. SH: You are pressing the lighter-displacement edge of IRC with designs like your 39ft Fastnet winner Lann Ael, the previous very successful Teasing Machine and new boats like the JND 43 Albator and now Teasing 3. But getting this type of boat to perform well across all conditions takes a lot of work compared with the heavier ‘old-school’ designs. Bernard Nivelt: Both Lann Ael and her close sister Stamina are being modified further this winter with an increase in sail area for light air, plus a new heavier keel for Lann Aelwhich competes more around the English Channel. In terms of design ratios the new JND 54 Teasing Machine 3 (winner of the latest Transatlantic Race) is similar to the 43-footers Albator and Teasing 2, but with the bigger
GILLES MARTIN-RAGET
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