Higher and certainly no slower… the 1992 America’s Cup Match in San Diego and the writing is on the wall for IACC hull flare. The comparatively slender and more slab-sided IACC design America3
of Bill
Koch’s ‘super-syndicate’ had enough speed to burn – especially upwind off the start – to see off Italy’s Louis Vuitton Cup winner Il Moro V, steered by Paul Cayard. The waterline beam of the two designs is in fact not all that different but this aerial shot illustrates the dramatically different deck beam and thus the wholly different topside profiles. Three years later and, while all the 1995 Cup teams had moved to narrower hull sections, it was only the Doug Peterson/Laurie Davidson-led design team of Team New Zealand that threw the kitchen sink at it with two black, pencil-slim IACC yachts that were just so fast as to almost make the job easy for the outstanding Kiwi sailing team, led by Russell Coutts and Brad Butterworth. New Zealand’s sailors flew home with both the America’s Cup and a win-loss record of 42-2 for their summer’s work
brought up into which were shovelled before it was left in the carpark overnight. Next morning Göran is knocking on my
door showing me the bar bill, which came to several thousand pounds, and asking what he should do? ‘Get in your car and drive towards Stockholm,’ I said. ‘Then when you get there call Tomas and tell him what happened. He might have calmed down by then.’ It wasn’t really funny, for not only did Tomas have a huge bar bill but the boatbuilders were comatose for the next two days and no work got done. That was an interesting project, for
Peter Norlin was not the problem and if
he and I had been left to decide the direction of design for the boat I’m sure we would have ended up with a far better boat. The roadblock was our technical leader-
ship, still in thrall to Bruce Farr and others’ IOR design legacy… which said flare can be fast. I retain enormous respect for the great Kiwi designer, but his IOR thinking was wholly irrelevant to the America’s Cup task at hand. There were, however, other com- pensations and my squash game and general fitness improved immensely and I even tried tennis (which I found difficult!) The head of the Swedish syndicate,
Tomas Wallin, also owned a nice hotel in which we stayed. There were squash courts, tennis courts, a swimming pool and two 12 Metre boats and an IOR boat or three at the dock. The hotel was built upside down with the reception rooms at the top at ground level and the bedrooms below spreading all the way down the sides of the Fjord to water level. Our lead boatbuilder was Killian Bush,
who you might remember went on to build many subsequent winners in the Volvo Ocean Race. Anyway, the hotel, to attract business,
very often ran themed weekends and one such was a golfing weekend when the reception area was filled with buckets of balls and golf clubs. Killian and I wan- dered through and couldn’t resist asking the receptionist if we might borrow a
bucket of balls and a club. ‘Of course,’ said the young girl, so off to the dock we both went and took turns whacking all the balls far out into the Fjord… Killian much further than me. When we returned with the empty bucket
the receptionist, bless her, asked us ‘Where are the balls?’ ‘Where do you think?’ said a charming Killian in his lilting Irish brogue. On another occasion Göran Borg,
charged with raising sponsorship, came to my office early one evening. He explained that he had a large amount of promotional material to send out to Swedish industry, and did I think the boatbuilders might be interested in packing the envelopes after they finished work at 9pm in return for free drinks at the bar. I told him that while I thought it would be OK, it was not up to me and that he should talk to Killian about it. Killian agreed to the arrangement and at 9pm the next evening 15 boatbuilders arrived and started packing envelopes. Now Göran obviously thought that it
would take near enough three hours to complete the job, so it wouldn’t cost Tomas too much at the bar, but by 9.30pm the boatbuilders were all done and ordering doubles in earnest. It wasn’t long before the bar was more or less dry of whisky, gin and vodka. Meanwhile, the boatbuilders were still staggering up to the bar, asking for 15 doubles of ‘whatever is left’. By midnight they were flaked out all over the place and a Transit van was
sure, particularly the finances… When I got up one morning and found that my company car had been repossessed it became evident that the syndicate was in some financial difficulty, much greater than could be accounted for by lost golf balls or a huge bar bill. It also just so happened that the car disappeared on the day Peter Norlin was coming over from Stockholm to visit the boat, which was being built in a large industrial unit near Stenungsund… I usually picked Peter up from the air-
port at Gothenburg but on this occasion I obviously couldn’t and he had to catch the bus, but it still left the problem of how we got from the hotel to the building shed. ‘Why don’t you borrow one of the recep- tionists’ cars?’ suggested Peter. So we asked if one of the girls would
lend us their car for a few hours… ‘Of course you can, David,’ said one of the them. ‘It’s the pink Fiat 500.’ So with keys in hand we set off looking for a pink Fiat 500. When we found it it was indeed pink but also had fluffy animals attached by elastic, bouncing up and down in every window. In those days the Fiat 500 was indeed a tiny car so we were just about sitting in each other’s laps and when we drove through Stenungsund Peter turned to me and said ‘David, we should have worn our shades. Someone might recog- nise us.’ Happy days.Dave Hollom, Yorkshire q
SEAHORSE 57
GILLES MARTIN-RAGET
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