Remarkable considering that the Décision built all-composite Maxi UBS Switzerland had already won the 1985/86 Whitbread Race, but when Windward Passage II appeared at the Kenwood Cup in 1988 she was the first ever inshore carbon Maxi. She soon made obsolete the rest of her aluminium rivals but would in turn herself be overwhelmed when Bill Koch built his ‘refined yet crude’ 90ft Maxi monster Matador2
a couple of years later. However, the far more elegant German Frers design is still the one that we’d hang on the office wall
supersede Sparkman & Stephens in another area too, one that brought consid- erable commercial value to his growing practice: that of in-house designer for Nautor’s Swan range of yachts. While Ron Holland, also at the top of the offshore racing world at the time, secured the smaller end of the prestigious Swan line-up, Frers replaced S&S in the 46ft-plus range. This was to set him up perfectly as the demand for ever larger racing and cruising yachts started to emerge in the mid-1980s. Beauty is of course highly subjective, but
I think it is fair to say that Germán Frers is generally regarded in the boating world as a creator of yachts where balance of line, pro- portions and overall aesthetics are second to none. This striving for and achieving beauty is nowhere better expressed than in the glorious 140ft superyacht Rebecca. Built in 1999, she was commissioned as a reproduc- tion classic, utilising styling symbols of a bygone era allied throughout with modern engineering. A perfect pallet for Frers to work his emotion-stirring aesthetic skills. And he did. Rebecca is, rightly, regarded
as one of the finest-proportioned yachts in existence. The story goes that such impor- tance was put on the combination of shear line and bow angle that not only were many drawn options considered, but sev- eral accurate scale models were also built to check out this all-important relationship. Interesting for the time, this did not favour the increasingly fashionable plumb bow. This affinity with beauty and a certain
commitment to the concept of a proper yacht did, however, make for a slight downside in those formative IOR days.
40 SEAHORSE
While Frers drew many good-looking small boats his only wins in the fierce level- rating Ton Cup classes occurred at the Two Ton level – the largest of the classes for boats around 44ft. The Frers IOR design philosophies simply
didn’t embrace the big dinghy approach which began in the Quarter Ton classes as far back as 1973 and then moved remorse- lessly through the Ton Cup classes and ulti- mately by 1981 had reached the premier big boat events like the Admiral’s Cup and Sardinia Cup. Frers characteristically drew several of the prettiest IOR One Tonners ever to compete in this class, especially during the super-hot decade 1982 to 1992, but they rarely reached the podium. Ironi- cally, though, Germán Frers was the first designer to make a commanding success of the big dinghy approach in the biggest IOR class of them all: the Maxi. In her first ever regatta – the 1988 Ken-
wood Cup in Hawaii – Rod Muir’s brand new Windward Passage II convincingly beat all the other established Maxi cham- pions. The new Passage was relatively beamy, light and wide sterned. She was also fractionally rigged, a design concept successfully brought to the masthead-dom- inated IOR Maxi class by Frers with the previous championship-winning Il Moro. It is probably fair to say that the success
of these two great Frers Maxis finally signalled the death of the masthead rig for IOR racing right across the size ranges. The third generation of the Frers family
yacht design business is headed up by Mani Frers III, who helped set up a second Frers design office in Milan originally to
service the mighty Il Moro di Venezia America’s Cup campaign of 1992. This was an absolutely massive campaign by the Italians to win the America’s Cup – now held in the new IACC class. The father and son team were given the oppor- tunity to develop an America’s Cup chal- lenger to a brand new, untested rule, with a five-boat development programme. Sadly, like every other challenger for the
Auld Mug that year, they embarked down the wrong design path. With a dose of further irony, the beamy, dinghy-like shape that appeared to be favoured by the new rule was, in fact, a blind alley. The Frers-designed Il Moro boats did
prove to be the fastest of the challengers by winning the Louis Vuitton Cup but in the America’s Cup itself they came up against a certain Doug Peterson-inspired Defender that by comparison was extraordinarily narrow of beam. This very different design path was to prove conclusive and became the dominant shape of this era of America’s Cup yachts. Ironically the Frers family would later join forces with Doug Peterson to design the Prada America’s Cup boats for the 2000 challenge, again making it through to the Cup Match before falling to Team New Zealand. Mani Frers then went on to use this
experience to be the sole designer for the Swedish Victory team of 2003 and 2007. But ultimately the America’s Cup remained a yachting trophy where Frers (along, to be fair, with most of the other modern design greats) would fail to emulate the success of Sparkman & Stephens. However, Germán Frers was very much
BARRY PICKTHALL/PPL
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