Here are a few 2018 articles you missed...
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The unruly beast
The Royal Ulster Yacht Club’s challenge for the America’s Cup in 1901 on behalf of Sir Thomas Lipton led to one of the most innovative, dramatic and controversial Cup summers in the trophy’s long history. Among the features was a radical new
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appreciation of how to design a fast boat. And (as we will see at the end of this article) its consequences include a much loved class of racing boat and one of the most authoritative and handsome books ever published about yacht racing This story has many surprises, but few were as startling as the four boats that com- peted that summer. Three of them were graceful 120ft LOA swans that (to quote a description of one of them) were ‘fair, fine and beautiful, with clear sweeps and an absence of hardness or freakishness’. That boat was Nathanael Greene Herreshoff’s latest creation, Constitution, built for a confident New York Yacht Club syndicate of proper millionaires. To general astonishment she was thor- oughly beaten in the American defender eliminations by her two-year-old Herreshoff- designed cousin Columbia, winner of the
previous Cup in 1899 and again in 1901. Columbia was not all that fast against Constitution, yet no boat with the Scots- born tactical genius Charlie Barr at the helm needed breakneck speed. Routinely within feet of violating one racing rule or another, he pushed, pulled and willed the older, slower boat to one narrow victory after another over the confident Constitution. In the subsequent Cup defence against Lipton’s superb Shamrock II, designed by GL Watson with the assistance of a pio- neering towing tank, Barr eeked out one of the closest victories in all of Cup history. The taut last race – described by one observer as ‘an Homeric contest’ – ended with the two boats luffing side by side across the finish line, Columbia winning the race and the Cup by mere seconds against her faster opponent.
These three boats seemed even more
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Faster faster
The AC50s used in Bermuda were hardly dull, but they were still considered a bit underwhelming by Russell Coutts and Larry Ellison for the new SailGP series. So former Team New Zealand designer Mike Drummond and current Ineos Team UK technical director Nick Holroyd were asked to give them wings… James Boyd looks at the result
The AC50 got (considerably) faster Setting out to change the AC50 flying cata- marans, as raced last year in Bermuda at the 35th America’s Cup, into a highly turboed, one-design fleet of F50s ready for 2019’s SailGP circuit was a unique challenge Russell Coutts presented to former Emirates Team New Zealand/SoftBank Team Japan technical director Nick Holroyd, plus the assembled team of designers, engineers, hydraulics and systems specialists and the team from Core Builders Composites.
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already one-design with the rule specifically written to encourage teams to concentrate their design efforts for the last Cup on foils and their wetboxes, wing engineering, and the control systems for both foils and wing, rather than on hull shapes, beams, mast tubes or wing configurations, and so on. ‘From my perspective, it was a very
pleasurable project because you sit there for three years [during the last AC cam- paign] slapping your forehead up against the class rule and then suddenly you can wipe that away and just go for it… yet without taking a lot of concept risk because you’re still playing in a domain that you know and understand. ‘There was enormous potential to speed
the boats up,’ explains Holroyd, who headed the AC50-F50 conversion/upgrade until recruited as lead designer of the latest British Cup challenge. ‘When the F50 pro- ject started I actually thought the brief might be to tame them in some way, but in fact very much the opposite happened. When- ever there was a choice between “simple” or “performance”, the choice was always “performance”.’ Such is the Coutts way. One of their principal challenges was
trying to equalise the fleet. The six boats that will kick off SailGP in Sydney in February comprise the Oracle Team USA, Team Japan, Artemis and Land Rover BAR AC50s plus two new ones made from the Oracle tooling, held at the US team’s builders, Core Builders Composites in Warkworth, New Zealand. Most of the existing boats came with
plentiful spare parts, including an extra wing. The Artemis AC50 required major
reworking as her wetbox arrangement was entirely different from Oracle’s while the British AC50 had had extensive repairs (that needed replacing) carried out after her flying port hull landed on SoftBank Team Japan during day one of the quali- fiers in Bermuda. Like the AC50s, the F50s remain
demountable and come with removable bows and sterns. This was so they can fit into a standard 40ft container for shipping, but also so the bows and sterns could be quickly replaced as they were deemed the most vulnerable parts of the boat; although as Mike Drummond, who took over after Holroyd moved on to Ineos, observes, ‘That’s not how it turned out in Bermuda.’ In fact, Coutts was one of the pioneers in
optimising racing yachts for easy trans- portation: he conceived the RC44 one- design, which remains the best 40-some- thing foot monohull to – most elegantly – be shoehorned into a standard container. For the first season the F50s will use the
original AC50 wings. Under the original class rule the basic geometry of these were all identical. Variations were in their engi- neering and control systems, says Mike Drummond: ‘The teams came up with different designs for the control systems for camber and twist. Some flaps are stiffer than others, but they also have greater forces actuating the twist of the flaps. Therefore, you won’t be able to mix and match flaps between the current wings because the control systems won’t all be able to power them properly.’ Nonetheless they have equalised the
wings as far as possible, says Holroyd: ‘A significant amount of tuning work was
If you enjoy yachting history and the off- the-water activities of our most colourful
Mid-size melting pot
If there is a buoyant market on the other side of the Channel, it is that of the smaller IRC boats (around 33ft), boosted by the growing interest in shorthanded races that is developing in the wake of the Tran- squadra, a solo and double-handed transat- lantic race reserved for amateurs over 40. It is from these niche foundations that a shipyard like JPK has developed, with its JPK 960 and JPK 1010, and that a commer- cial giant like Jeanneau re-entered the racing market with the launch of its successful Sun
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Fast 3200 (which also marked the return to the racecourse of designer Daniel Andrieu, who both drew the 3200 and campaigns his own example with great success). Now that sector is on the boil again with new designs either recently launched or well-advanced. Jean Pierre Kelbert has started the construction of a JPK 1030, the young Spanish shipyard Mestral Marine Works is launching a 33ft Michele Molino design (issue 451), while the unusual Marc Lombard-designed Ofcet 32, first launched in autumn 2016, is now benefit- ing from a process of steady optimisation, the first fruits of which were seen with an overall win in May in the ArMen Race, a 320nm ‘mid-shore’ race starting and fin- ishing in La Trinité-sur-Mer.
Among recent improvements to the boat, the Ofcet 32 has been lightened by between 150 and 200kg depending on the boat (five Ofcets are currently competing in IRC), with further detail improvements in deck systems and rig as well as to the appendages, with
draught reduced by 8cm. For several of the boats lead has also been taken out of the gallery in the aft part of the keel allowing the longitudinal trim of the hull to move for- ward and reduce stern immersion for better performance in light air.
In the same process the upwind sail area of the Ofcet has increased by 2.7m2 (almost five per cent). As Yann Dubé, director of the La Rochelle shipyard, explains, ‘The boat’s characteristics and specifications are actually now closer to what Marc’s [Lombard] office originally intended, but which had been changed by some of the teams during the first season!’ Very radical in its design, with a wide waterline, bulky forward sections, a blunt nose, near-vertical freeboards and a distinct turn of bilge, the Ofcet 32 immedi- ately showed strong performance in the breeze, particularly off the wind, but was not as good upwind – especially below 15kt of wind. With considerable form stability, high ballast ratio and a modest
If you're interested in IRC designs then ‘Mid-size Melting Pot’ in the August issue looked
And for some higher tech... In the
December issue Cup- winning designers Mike
Andrew Hurst, Editor
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Seahorse Issue 469 £5.50 US$8.50
The Imoca flood-gates are open Unwrapping your new Figaro 3 Paul Cayard heads (deep) south Banque Populaire are back (twice) Eric Goetz – is that a bi-plane? Andy Claughton – 75-feet of scow?
Game over for the canoes? – the scows fill in the gaps
MARCH 2019 The official
magazine of the Royal Ocean Racing Club
INGRID ABERY
F A WALTER
PIERRICK CONTIN
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