Sparkman & Stephens’ IOR dominance peaked in the mid-1970s with the appearance of names like Doug Peterson, Holland, Frers and Dubois, who would take over with surprising speed. In 1975 of 57 yachts racing the Admiral’s Cup 24 were designed by the New York firm. Two years later (above) Cornelis van Rietschoten’s Maxi Flyer would deliver S&S their second – and final – Whitbread Race title after their earlier win with the S&S-designed Swan 65 Sayula. But as younger designers found their feet – and some clients – things then moved fast and come the 1977 Admiral’s Cup you would be hard pressed to find a single S&S design in the top half of the results
For the 1980 defence Olin, once again,
was responsible for Dennis Conner’s success- ful defender Freedom, which arguably took the original Intrepid concept to its ultimate successful conclusion. But the next stage of the 12 Metre story would feature another design revolution in the form of the wing- keeled, Ben Lexcen-designed Australia II and it would not include S&S. Olin’s retirement from competitive yacht design rather neatly coincided with this new era. The esoteric art of Metre boat design
had fascinated Olin in his formative years, after meeting Clinton Crane back in the late 1920s, as the rule really did, very suc- cessfully, ‘measure’ incremental changes in hull shape, helping to define that all-impor- tant relationship between lines and speed, the study that had hooked Olin at the start. But while the Metre boats, culminating
in Freedom, were a huge part of the S&S story, more significant was the ocean- racing lineage from Dorade, through the Maxi Bolero, the centreboard Finisterre, the 34ft Hestia, the 1965 Admiral’s Cupper Firebrand (one of Olin’s favourite designs), the 1966/67 One Tonners Roundabout, Sunmaid and Rainbow, the five Prospect of Whitbys, the 61ft Running Tide, through to the final golden boat of Olin’s era, the 51ft Pinta which placed second individual boat in the 1975 Admiral’s Cup. Indeed, in many ways the 1975 Admiral’s
Cup denoted the pinnacle of the success story of Olin and Rod: an amazing 24 out of the 57 yachts competing in Cowes that year were designed by Sparkman & Stephens. Finally, one of the company’s last off-
shore racing designs, the 46ft Challenge, overseen by Olin and drawn by Bill Langan, appropriately bookended Olin’s remarkable career at the top of ocean racing yacht design by winning the 1983
48 SEAHORSE
Sydney Hobart Race with Olin now in semi-retirement at the age of 75. Throughout the S&S design era both
Olin and Rod always struck a careful balance between speed and seaworthiness. Olin with his fast, but not extreme, hull shapes and Rod with deck layouts that not only looked after the handling require- ments of the crew, but kept the ocean where it belonged. This innate conser- vatism influenced much of what Sparkman & Stephens produced, but as with many things it wasn’t the whole story. In the pursuit of race results and ever
faster boats in the ongoing dance between speed and rating, S&S more or less invented the offshore ‘racing machine’ with boats like the 48ft Bay Bea in 1968 and her close sistership Aura in 1970. These boats were stripped out below with just pipe cots and everything taken out of the ends. On deck, coamings and any protection for the crew disappeared in the interests of windage and weight. They began a trend that would ultimately lead to the end of the dual-purpose ocean racer and open the door to ever lighter dedicated raceboats. Series-produced designs, throughout the
Sparkman & Stephens history, were another key part of the success story and helped to enable a staggering number of yachts to be afloat throughout the world bearing the moniker of S&S. Indeed, Olin’s first ever design to be built, drawn in 1928, was a production boat, albeit in timber, as were many of his designs before World War II and later throughout the 1950s. But when glassfibre became the material
of choice for series boatbuilding, then the numbers really took off. If you wanted the best guarantee of commercial success in production yacht building then having a design by S&S was the way to go. An
astonishing 242 different S&S designs were series produced; one of the most successful numerically was the Tartan range built in the USA with a total of 22 different designs from 1961 starting with the Tartan 27, of which 712 examples were built over the following 19 years. In all the total number of Tartan branded yachts built was 3,620 – every one of them by S&S. But this production boat success story was
to be eclipsed only a handful of years later when amateur yachtsman Pekka Koskenkylä elected to make what turned out to be an epoch-defining decision: to start a new yacht-building facility in Finland. He consulted his friends at the local
yacht club on how to get started. The advice they gave was to employ a top-class designer, preferably one with an inter - national reputation. The name Sparkman & Stephens came to the minds of the assembled members. S&S were enjoying a very productive period conquering the European market, notably with the huge success of the Dutch 34-footer Hestia, the 43ft Admiral’s Cupper and 1963 Fastnet winner Clarion of Wight and the follow-up Admiral’s Cupper Firebrand, a member of the UK team in 1965 and again in 1967. Duly armed with this new-found knowl-
edge, Pekka set about contacting this far- away design company S&S on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. But he was about to discover that ordering a new production design from an international yacht design company involved a lot more than simply asking for and paying for a new design… Such was the reputation and success of
S&S during this mid-1960s period that the design team at 79 Madison Avenue, by now counting some 20 employees, was flat out drawing new yachts, motorboats, motor sailors, keelboats and dinghies. They could
ALASTAIR BLACK/PPL
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