In contrast, Team New Zealand, now led
by Russell Coutts, took a typically Kiwi more open-lensed approach. Due to the lim- itations of vacuum vs autoclave curing their mast couldn’t match America3
’s minimum
dimensions and still achieve minimum weight. Turning this disadvantage into an advantage, they created masts with fore and aft dimensions substantially larger than the minimums, adding much-needed stiffness. Early worries about drag were dispelled
by aerodynamic studies. And they realised what America3
missed: the longer mast
added free sail area. They also improved genoa trimming by moving the jumper stay attachment to the top spreader base, where others attached jumper stays to the base of the next spreader down. Their better boat won the Cup 4-0 that
summer and brought it home. It might have been closer but for the relative disarray on the US side. Dennis Conner’s Stars & Stripes won the Defence trials but used the PACT 95 team’s boat against Coutts. Many thought America3
’s Mighty Mary was the
fastest US boat but it was not available to Conner (Cup politics…) For the 2000 Cup in Auckland our
company was chosen to make the spars for the John Marshall-led New York Yacht Club entry Young America. Bruce Farr and Russell Bowler teamed up with Hall’s spar designer Scott Ferguson to take IACC masts in a new direction. As mentioned, the mast dimensions were limited by the rule but only minimum dimensions – and Team New Zealand had already successfully tried longer masts. Bowler took the concept much further, designing very large, almost wing- like tubes that combined better aerodynam- ics with a significant addition of sail area. In addition, because rules were relatively vague, Bowler lobbied the jury hard and received permission for a certain amount of mast rotation, further increasing the mast’s effectiveness. Ferguson recalled the rotation was ‘about plus or minus three degrees’. Scott did his part designing the much
larger mast to minimum weight. Basically it employed a conventional mandrel-moulded mast core with a ‘false’ foam trailing edge covered with two very thin plies of carbon. The mast was also designed with floating two-point spreader fittings to allow the three-degree mast rotation. The aft point was fixed. The forward support was a through- mast tube that connected the forward mounts of each spreader, keeping the spread- ers in line athwartships as the mast rotated. Another of Scott’s innovations was the
addition of hydraulic cylinders to tension the lower ends of the jumper stays. These certainly made an improvement to real-time race tuning. The crew did get a little zealous one day and over-tensioned one of the stays causing the cylinder to pull out of the mast. The mast survived and after a repair there were no further adventures. Interestingly, none of us thought the
mostly foam trailing edge would make any contribution to stiffness so no added stiffness calculations were done. Much to
48 SEAHORSE
North Sails designer Steve Calder’s frustra- tion, the mast was in fact a lot stiffer and wouldn’t bend to the luff curves in his mainsail designs. Back to the sail loft. Meanwhile, across the Auckland Harbor
Viaduct Team New Zealand’s Steve Wilson’s team were going in another highly creative direction. By 2000 the boats had minimum beam with resulting very narrow chainplate widths. Because of the resultant narrow shroud angles, tuning wasn’t easy and stretch-resisting heavy staying was needed to keep the rigs in column. Wilson’s colleague Mike Drummond
came up with a clever idea to increase effec- tive shroud angles by crisscrossing the diag- onals above and below all of the spreaders. The result was reduced mast compression, lighter, lower windage rigging and rigs that held their sideways tune much better throughout the wind range – all clear per- formance advantages. The system had the added benefit of eliminating one set of spreaders, further reducing windage. While Team New Zealand practised,
Young America were dominating the other challengers. Her record was 14-2 when, on that fateful day, she broke in half. She was fortunately saved from sinking by an alert
and plucky crew. When crewman Jerry Kirby saw that the boat was staying afloat he jumped back on and, seeing the boom stuck under the deck, pumped the vang and straightened the broken hull a bit, saving her from sinking. Hearing about this I notified Bobby Campbell, the team’s shore boss, that doing that voided our boom war- ranty. He clearly appreciated the intended humour on an otherwise very dark day. Young America’s second boat was not
the first boat’s equal and the team never recovered. Team New Zealand went on to handily dispose of eventual challenger Luna Rossa and the Wilson team brainchild was aptly named the ‘Millennium Rig’. Rule- makers subsequently outlawed Bowler’s wide-chord design and maximum limits were added to mast dimension rules. The Millennium Rig ended up on virtually all subsequent IACC masts. That it hasn’t found much other application is only because few, if any, non-America’s Cup racing boats were subsequently designed with narrow staying as genoa jibs faded in favour of minimum overlap headsails. Those of us in the Young America camp
could only think ‘if only’. And if she’d won, would Bowler’s wing-like solution have
GILLES MARTIN-RAGET
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