News Around the World
Charlie Dalin crosses the finish line of the Arctique Race less than an hour behind winner Jérémie Beyou on Charal and 20 minutes in front of third-place man Thomas Ruyant’s LinkedOut. Dalin passed Beyou in the Doldrums last year to win the TJV and his Verdier design is very slippery – as planned – through tricky transition zones. Dalin may be a VG virgin but he is one of the top names of the Figaro circuit and like all of his fellow Figaristes will be very hard to beat through the tactical stages of this year’s big solo adventure
NEW ZEALAND Man of the moment Moored on the dock in front of Emirates Team New Zealand’s imposing headquarters, just behind the gleaming superyacht owned by team principal Matteo de Nora, is a modest 45-year-old 8.1m wooden yacht that reveals its light displacement by tugging at its mooring lines with a kind of restless energy. If this little sample of New Zealand sailing heritage seems out of place against the backdrop of leading-edge America’s Cup design and technology, it comes as even more of a surprise to learn that it is the pride and joy of French- man Guillaume Verdier, whose primary task within the design team is focused on making the new AC75s fly. Although he shuns the accolade Verdier’s work on foiling has
gained him a reputation as one of world’s top exponents of the science with projects spanning a wide range, from the America’s Cup to the flying round-the-world Imocas, to giant Jules Verne multihulls and even commercial passenger ships. Yet, notwithstanding his work on the rarefied challenges of creating
foiling machines that flirt with speeds of 50kt, Verdier has high admiration for Bruce Farr’s first attempt at a keelboat. ‘The hull lines are just perfect,’ he says of his little Half Tonner, which is a sistership to Titus Canby, the yacht Farr drew for his skiff crewmate Rob Blackburn nearly half a century ago. Verdier found the yacht in a dilapidated state in Auckland, bought
it for $5,000 and, with the help of some of his team-mates, has fixed it up in his spare time. ‘It is just a minimal fixing, enough to survive kids and family cruising and members of the team. They are all welcome to take it out with their girlfriends, or wives and families. It really belongs to us all.’ In his determination to downplay his own role in the foiling
revolution, Verdier reminds us that back in the mid-1970s, right at the time Farr was embarking on his stellar career in keelboat design, commercial hydrofoil ferries were transporting passengers in Europe. ‘In fact,’ he adds, ‘if you look through the patents, hydrofoils go right back to the late 19th and early 20th century.
20 SEAHORSE ‘Before the commercial ferries the military had huge hydrofoil
boats that could move fast from one point to the other and then strike at the enemy.’ Although commercial hydrofoils probably proved uneconomical after fuel costs soared – they could consume 3,500 litres in 15 minutes – the foil technology was quite well developed. As a schoolboy at the Mathématiques Supérieures, where Verdier
started dreaming about boat design, the science of hydrofoils was one of the subjects. Small sailboats were also experimenting with foiling in the 1970s and after a programme of development stretching back to the 1980s the big French multihull foiler Hydroptère broke the world speed record in 2009 with a speed of 52.86kt. About a year later Verdier was contracted to work with Emirates
Team New Zealand for the 2013 Cup challenge. ‘I came into this team at an opportune time and the design group, driven by Nick Holroyd, said we are going to push as hard as we can and the way to go fast is to take off.’ That led to the so-called Waka project, where through the winter
of 2012 the team tested foiling concepts on Lake Arapuni in the Waikato. A breakthrough occurred quite late in the programme as they were testing an L-shape aluminium foil, which was proving very unstable – until it broke. ‘It broke at the welded elbow joint,’ Verdier explains, ‘but the horizontal piece did not detach. Instead, it folded up into a V-shape. ‘Glenn Ashby was driving the Waka and he suddenly yelled out,
“Guys, it is really stable.” It was a eureka moment. Actually, at that time the first foil for the AC72 was already being built, but we changed direction and worked on the V-shape concept.’ Verdier says the foiling development in the America’s Cup had
a profound effect on moving the technology and understanding for- ward, particularly in terms of upwind and downwind stability. In San Francisco the last-minute breakthrough in upwind foiling by the American defender won the Cup. ‘We were right on the edge of that, but our set-up was more draggy and they found a trick to foil upwind.’ Which reopens the controversy over the American control system. Verdier shrugs it off. ‘Their system was approved, so it was
FRANCOIS VAN MALLEGHEM/DPPI
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