IRC
Winning ways
When putting together a programme blueprint for handicap racing there’s a lot you can do to accomplish your objectives before you even hit the water. l Set lofty but attainable goals lMake sure you have the right people lMake sure you have the right platform/tool for the job l Optimise your rating to the best of your ability l And... pick a schedule that complements all of the above I’ve had the pleasure of sailing on the Wizard with the Askew
brothers since 2016. When I first joined the programme we were sailing an ORR-optimised Reichel/Pugh 74. The boat had won back- to-back Barn Doors in the Transpacs of 2011 and 2013, one with Hap Fauth as Bella Mente and one with the Askews as Wizard. The short-term goal was to bring that boat east and to be as competitive as possible knowing it wasn’t IRC optimised and it really only liked to go downwind… Straightaway we targeted ORR events including the Newport-
Bermuda and the Mackinac Island Race on the Great Lakes. Next we targeted races that didn’t demand stability: we prioritised the Key West feeder race and the Montego Bay Race. We decided to steer clear of the Caribbean 600! When we had to sail under IRC we did – helping our cause by
eliminating oversized headsails from our sail inventory, turning our ORR R2 into an IRC 75% mid-girth fractional zero. We won and set the course record in the Key West feeder,
achieved line honours in the Montego Bay Race and won the Chicago Mac Race overall. Like most of the fleet we took a pass on the 2016 Bermuda Race because of a big low that was lurking around the Gulf Steam… and our tippy platform wasn’t intended to race in those conditions. Our bout of success, coupled with our failure to start the Bermuda
34 SEAHORSE
Race, sent us toward a new platform with new goals. The 2019 Atlantic Ocean Racing Series was on the horizon and this quickly became the longterm objective. The search for a new platform ensued. We needed a purpose-built ocean racing boat, preferably a canter,
that did well in IRC. We combed the market and quickly narrowed in on old Volvo 70s, even though there were a couple of other interesting candidates. There were a few for sale at the time but we settled on Giacomo, the ex-Groupama, because of its track record of success in the Volvo and later under IRC. It’s my opinion that box rule boats that get raced and developed by the best sailors in the world tend to outperform their naval architect inputs – examples include the TP52, Maxi72 and, yes, the Volvo 70. Once Team Wizard had the tool it was straight into the Sydney
Hobart, a race the boat was optimised for and had won in the past. It was also a good course to learn the tool and the boat came away with class honours in IRC 0. From there it was back to the States for some Bermuda Race redemption. In the same Hobart config- uration the boat won overall honours and took home the coveted Gibbs Hill Lighthouse Trophy. Not ones to rest on our laurels, this is when the real tweaking
began. We’d learnt a lot about triple-heading, J0s and whisker poles in the last Volvo on the VO65s and wanted to bring these gains to the Volvo 70. We did a fully crewed delivery from Newport, RI to West Palm Beach, FL to test the theory and it proved correct. This boat probably had 100,000 miles on the clock before we
got our hands on it – with those miles comes a set of meticulously refined polars. When we put up our new triple-headed sail combi- nation the boat was quickly doing 110 per cent of the original targets. It was at that point that we knew we were onto something. IRC hits headsail luff-length hard, so we had to do something
DANIEL FORSTER
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