Never understated, Peter de Savary was peerless at making an entrance. Over a colourful life the man whose 12 Metre programme played a key part in relieving the New York Yacht Club of the Auld Mug adopted numerous persona, though when it came to football a stake in Millwall FC (left) and a brief term as chairman were both typical and telling – their fans’ famous chant, ‘Nobody likes us, we don’t care’, familiar to a man who brought out the worst kind of snobbery in the British establishment… made worse, it must be added, by often opaque business arrangements. But in the end, who had more fun? De Savary was also comfortable in anyone’s company – except some of the aforementioned – from America’s Cup designers and sailors (above) to the fellow Harley Davidson enthusiasts (right) he often hosted at his elite hotels. Following a plane crash in St Barts in which his pilot was killed and his young daughter had to be revived, De Savary did take a lower profile, winding back the brash showmanship. But the Cuban cigars remained omnipresent
Alan Bond’s right-hand man in the Cup who was every bit as pugnacious and shrewd as his boss. Ian Howlett, retained by de Savary from his toe-in-the-water involvement with Lionheart, had his design brief. Angus Melrose had the sail loft to run. Robin Fouger ran a tight shore team. Phil Crebbin was a skipper but one who did not have the final say over his crew. Halfway through, Lt Col Tim Street arrived to get a grip on the crew. Jim Alabaster managed a lot of the other shore operations. But there was no one person who all these department heads reported in to… other than PdS himself. And for extensive periods during that
glorious Newport summer PdS himself was fully occupied taking care of business in other parts of the world. In an enterprise so focused on its boss, the vacuum of PdS’s absences and the whirlwind of his arrival as he flew back in again robbed the cam- paign of coherence. From its rapid-fire launch Victory
stubbed its toe repeatedly. The build schedule for Boat 1 from Dubois slipped and after launching the hull was found to be out of true. She proved good in light air and downwind against Australia but uncompetitive upwind until a big keel change. The decision for Boat 2 was on/off and Lionheart was mothballed before being brought back into commission. Crew-wise some obvious candidates
were not involved in the early set-up. Many of Britain’s then top sailors held key positions in the industry or needed incen- tives to commit long term. There wasn’t the pay or security of employment to make signing up a straightforward choice. Street held some autumn match racing
camps in the Solent with the Cowes’ Daring fleet to widen the talent pool and ginger things up, but other planned rounds were
unexpectedly cancelled. Sailmaker and dinghy champion Peter Bateman was then brought in as the link between the sailing squad and PdS as belated recognition that all was not as it could be. One initiative that really did over-
achieve was the 1981 Admiral’s Cup. Long before Newport the paths of Alan
Bond and Peter de Savary had intercepted in Cowes. Bond had a long history in off- shore racing and de Savary, like him, saw the benefit of running a smaller-scale top- flight campaign to get the wheels of his America’s Cup organisation meshing properly. Bond’s Apollo V was a Peterson 45 skippered by John Bertrand for the Australia team in Cowes while de Savary’s Victory of Burnham was a Dubois 44 steered by Phil Crebbin, with Flying Dutchman sailor and highly successful insurance broker Johnson Wooderson brought in to add a mature sure-touch to the operation as skipper. Three things will be remembered. The
British team won handsomely. Victory of Burnham was top boat in the team. And six months later all hell broke loose when the Victory’s rating was found to be a massive 1.4ft too low when she was measured in the US for the SORC series. In pure mathematical terms Victory of
Burnham’s re-rating would not have changed the outcome of the Admiral’s Cup but it did substantiate the repeated urgings, including from Dubois himself, that the boat’s RORC-issued rating needed checking because it was far better than projected… On the water and ashore the usual Poms
and Aussies narrative was in play, but Bond and de Savary turned up the volume when, chest to chest, they agreed to a match race between the boats on an Admi- ral’s Cup lay-day. The wager was a small matter of £10,000 in gold Krugerrands,
winner takes all. Bragging rights/blushes were denied/spared as the race fizzled out in light air with the time limit, but it was a taste of the show to come across the Atlantic in Rhode Island over the follow- ing two summers. In the first Newport summer in 1982 de
Savary often had both Ed Dubois and Ian Howlett with him monitoring the tune-up and testing of the British 12 Metres. De Savary would regale what good company Dubois was, reading snippets from the newspapers, running through his whole gamut of interests, anecdotes and whimsy, while Howlett would train his binoculars studiously on the boats and carefully record his observations. Through winter training in Nassau,
where de Savary had a base (and a bank) and two more summers in Newport, crew matters remained in flux. A need to have a competitive tune-up crew saw Lawrie Smith and Rodney Pattisson enlisted. Harold Cud- more left the campaign, Chris Law joined and when the Boat 2 decision was made it was an Ian Howlett (now the designated design chief) creation, delivered with just three months left before the challenger trials. On 1 May, when Victory ’83 sailed for
the first time, de Savary helmed most of the day himself. Even at this last stage it was far from clear if a settled race crew had been selected. Few team members from the initial launch remained. Kit Hobday’s disagreements with de Savary over the direction of the campaign were scarcely hidden from view either. Whether de Savary considered this
ferment within the squad to be a healthy incentive to performance, or whether more would have been achieved by clearly com- municating roles and understanding per- sonalities better, was a big talking point 40 years ago. Strong views persist today.
SEAHORSE 39
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116 |
Page 117 |
Page 118 |
Page 119 |
Page 120 |
Page 121 |
Page 122 |
Page 123 |
Page 124 |
Page 125 |
Page 126
