Above: ORC B European Champion – Jens Kuphal’s modified 2004 Mills-designed Landmark 43 Intermezzo. In second place just 1pt behind her was another Landmark 43, White Shadow. The best-modified Jeppesen X-41, usual ORC frontrunner, was 3rd. There was not one custom/racing design in a 21-boat ORC B fleet (nor ORC C) which did, however, count eight X-41s plus a smattering of other Mills designs (the designer’s 45-footer Halbtrocken also won ORC A). ORC fleets remain dominated by production yachts but there is no shortage of professional sailors enjoying the rare bit of comfort; only 20 of the 55 entries in the regatta qualifying as Corinthians
Improving the odds
In the evening Casper Nielsen is an occasional contributor to these pages, by day he is a successful practitioner of extending the racing life of older designs without blowing the budget. One of Nielsen’s more ambitious projects was to optimise a production 43-footer for ORC, the modified 2004 design going on to become the 2022 ORC European Champion. Nielsen talks philosophy and execution with Øyvind Bordal
Casper Nielsen is a naval architect based in Copenhagen, Denmark. He specialises in foil design and rating optimisation, and is also often seen racing a Club Swan 50 on the Mediterranean circuit. Back at the end of 2021 Nielsen’s
received a brief to optimise the Landmark 43 Intermezzo – already in its 15th season – working with colleague Max Gurgel who oversaw performance optimisation. The ambition of the project, owned and skip- pered by German Jens Kuphal, was to win the 2022 European ORCi Championship in Hankø, Norway. Which they did…
ORC and IRC We have come to visit Nielsen in his home office in the outskirts of Copenhagen. A sketchpad between us is frequently used to illustrate points that sometimes can be hard to define precisely in words. ‘ORC and IRC are today’s two domi-
nant international rating rules,’ he says. ‘The main difference between them is that ORC is an open source rule – everything is accessible and the consequences of changes can be easily tested. IRC, on the other hand, is a black box rule, where you may have a limited number of test certificates but cannot precisely see the details of where TCC changes may originate. IRC is a secret code, you may say. But from expe- rience what works well in ORC seems to work well in IRC too. Most of my own work is done in ORC simply because the majority of my clients are in this part of the world – and here we race under ORC.’
Which boat? My first question is about the present rating rules and how they drive design. It’s no secret that rating rules still decide how a racing boat looks. Racing boats are simply designed to do well based on the
parameters of the rule. So new rule, new boat. We all know what a classic IOR boat looks like and, to a certain degree, the same goes for the successor, IMS. Now what defines a good ORC/IRC boat? ‘Well, it’s certainly not a pure planing
boat,’ he says. ‘I would say it’s a boat that mainly operates in displacement mode. ‘The Landmark 43 is a good example. A
lot of people continue to choose older designs like this, because the rule gives you a so-called “age allowance”, which can be just shy of half a per cent on the certificate, which is significant. The Swan 42 and X-41 are good examples. If you took a really modern, fast boat like a Class40 they would be punished horribly. Extreme boats stretch the corners of the rule. ‘For instance, ORC still punishes low
weight and deep draught pretty hard; also, a lot of stability remains very expensive on the rating certificate.’
Majority rules ‘But you can still get away with fairly light boats,’ he continues. ‘An X-41 is about 6,800kg when not loaded, which is not so much for a boat that size. But again it’s not extremely light either! Especially expensive
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