very constrained and all the technical partners were under pressure to deliver. ‘With a new project like this the challenge is always in making sure all the elements develop in harmony,’ says Bouzaid. Initially the information comes together slowly as individual partners work on refining their own area. But, as each part affects the other, it all has to work together in the end and inevitably time quickly compresses against the deadline. In this instance the progression
For the sailmakers the result of
that first testing session was to refine the design, mainly by juggling the distribution of sail area. Says Stubbs: ‘The principal driving power comes from the mainsail, so we made that a little bigger and the jibs a little smaller for better balance.’ The mainsail sets within a
Andrew Brown, Doyle’s
one-design specialist and an Olympic sailor and coach, attended the trial along with designer Paul Stubbs. Brown is no stranger to foiling, but says his initial trial sail on the SuperFoiler was a revelation. ‘They are fun to watch but terrifying to sail,’ he laughs. Their first observation was how
highly loaded these boats became as the triallists cranked down hard. Trimming the mainsheet is very physical and requires a powerful 90kg-type athlete to handle the loads. Right through the structure of the boat the power generated was exerting eye-opening loads. A dramatic near-pitchpole occurred on the first day of testing when the line holding the leeward board down slid casually but relentlessly through a jam cleat rated at 800kg, as if it didn’t exist. The board shot up, the boat plunged off the foil and went down the mine, catapulting the three trapezes round the front of the mast and leaving everybody shaken and bruised. Clearly taming the beast was not
going to be easy, but nobody was asking for a reduction in horsepower, only for ways to harness it. As Pete Melvin observed drily, getting to grips with control issues was going to ‘require a very special skillset that will take some time to develop’.
In the 90s Bill Macartney invented and operated the 18-Foot Skiff Skiff Grand Prix, which set the new benchmark for televised sailing. Few comparable circuits ever matched the presentation of that series and fewer still got anywhere near the level of interest from the non-sailing public. The same team’s SuperFoiler picks up where the skiffs left off, taking a very current route to generating all the drama. Meanwhile, the 18-footers calmed down a (little) bit with a switch to one-design from the virtually unlimited monsters of that grand prix era…
wishbone boom. The profile is a very high-aspect rectangular shape, as like a wing as a conventional soft sail can get. As the project developed further refinement went into matching mast shape and luff curves for maximum efficiency. As with any foiling boat, the key
is to get up and fly as quickly as possible. That is a function of trim and technique that demands initial high power from the sails to deliver maximum acceleration and then a quick adjustment to flatten out and reduce drag as the apparent wind rapidly moves forward. Cunningham trim plays a large
role in that shape transition and again the loads involved were considerable, requiring the cunningham purchase to be increased from 16:1 to 64:1. In keeping with the cutting-edge
nature of the exercise, the sails utilise Doyle’s high-tech Stratis technology with a combination of carbon and Technora fibres. ‘At the kind of speeds we are talking about it is vital to have a very stable membrane,’ says Bouzaid. ‘The demands on a pretty small piece of highly loaded cloth are extreme. It is well beyond the mainstream.’ Those qualities saw Stratis material also utilised for the trampolines between the hulls, relying on the stability of Stratis to add structural stiffness to the hull platform. With the launch of the
SuperFoiler grand prix circuit fast approaching, the time for refinement and development was
was incredibly fast. The testing of the prototype took place in August 2017 and six completed identical boats had to be delivered in time for the first event of the five-stop summer circuit in Australia in February 2018 – with a line-up of talented professional teams, a TV broadcast schedule and widely dispersed venues all ready to go. Initially the idea was that the
boats would have a light-air rig and a moderate to heavy-air rig, but that was changed to a single rig with two sets of sails. That decision was only made in January, so the Doyle team had less than a month to produce two sets of race sails, plus practice sails for six teams. ‘The guys on the production floor love a challenge like this,’ says Andrew Brown. ‘Working on an entirely new, cutting-edge project of this nature is exciting for everybody involved.’ Excitement is what the
SuperFoiler concept is all about, promoting the new grand prix circuit as fast and furious racing involving ‘the best flying sailors in the business’. Not surprisingly, the so-called dream team of Glenn Ashby, Nathan Outteridge and Iain Jensen, fresh out of America’s Cup campaigns in San Francisco and Bermuda, showed a clean pair of heels around the course, winning 21 straight races, before fellow Cup campaigner Paul Campbell-James (Luna Rossa 2013, BAR 2017) broke their winning streak. But the others are learning fast
and the gap is closing. Foiling gybes are making an appearance and as the skill levels climb foiling tacks look tantalisingly close. ‘The crazy thing, ‘says Bouzaid,
‘is that all those loads that took us a bit by surprise when we had those top-gun sailors pushing the prototype so hard during the testing sessions, they’ve all gone out of the window. As soon as the racing started we saw a whole new dimension of loads, much higher than anything we saw in testing.’ Clearly the development path has
some way to run… while the boats themselves will only get faster.
www.doylesails.com
q SEAHORSE 63
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