Left: it’s back to school for Italian champion navigator Matteo Plazzi and US silver medallist and Volvo Race winner John Kostecki, trying to keep up while a super-relaxed Franck Cammas drives his all-conquering Orma 60 Groupama 3 upwind at 25kt in practice shortly after a Deed of Gift Match was called for America’s Cup 2010. Cammas mentored the Oracle sailors right through to the Cup, slotting in comfortably alongside other members of the Groupama Band including designers VPLP and foil expert Michel Kermarec. Above: how wrong did it all go when that bitch-fight broke out between Oracle and Alinghi following Alinghi’s successful defence of the America’s Cup in Valencia? Well, this fleet race in Spain in 2007 neatly demonstrates what a popular America’s Cup looks like. Eleven teams took part in that year’s Louis Vuitton Cup with some refreshingly good newcomers including South Africa’s gritty and hungry Shosholoza; after finishing runner-up to Emirates Team New Zealand in the round-robins Oracle Racing were brushed aside 5-1 in the semi-finals by Luna Rossa who in turn lost 5-0 to Team New Zealand in the final. Team NZ themselves would then go on to lose a very tight Match 5-2 to Alinghi with the margin in the final deciding race just one second. After two failed challenges it would have been ‘nice’ had US team Oracle won the Cup in comparable boats rather than using the courts to force a different kind of race; but then the two-time winners stuck around for at least 15 seconds after losing the trophy in 2017. That’s the America’s Cup for you
intriguing, harking back to the golden, olden days of the Cup when the typical yacht’s overall length was 130ft or more. But in 1988 New Zealand’s Michael Fay got severely tripped up when he pursued that line of thinking with his ‘rogue chal- lenge’ of the San Diego Yacht Club, and its representative, Stars & Stripes. What tripped up Fay was San Diego’s
response with a multihull half the length of Fay’s 90ft LWL monohull sloop. The multi- hull was deemed valid after a pitched, precedent- setting, seesaw battle in court resulting in a mismatch that was a yacht racing travesty. The 1988 match – and the 1870 match,
in which Franklin Osgood’s Magic bested James Lloyd Ashbury’s British challenger Cambria – were the only other editions of the Cup where the challenger and defender could not agree on a class of boat and other details, so the donor’s ‘default rules’ contained in the Deed of Gift prevailed. When it comes to a DoG match, since
they were legitimised in 1988, multihulls will always be the boats of choice simply because for a given length they are so much faster. When Larry Ellison decided to file a
challenge at midnight on 9 July 2007 three things had to happen. Firstly, Oracle Team’s operating officer Melinda Erkelens
rushed off to get a new agreement signed with Golden Gate Yacht Club. GGYC had been Ellison’s official challenger through two Cups but his formal agreement with them had now expired. Next Tom Ehman got the paperwork
together… with a little help from the aforementioned Michael Fay. ‘He and Andrew Johns [Fay’s attorney, and 1988 rules expert] were most supportive,’ Ehman says now. In fact, Fay and Johns visited the team in Valencia and passed Ehman their challenge papers from 1988. Ehman says he virtually copied them. Third, Ian ‘Fresh’ Burns, head of Oracle’s
design/performance team, was charged with coming up with the dimensions of the chal- lenging vessel, a DoG requirement. Burns immediately called Michel Ker-
marec, a multihull and foil expert living in France. Kermarec, often referred to as a ‘genius’ within the Oracle ranks, turned out to be a good call… ‘I was having dinner with friends when Burns called,’ Kermarec says. ‘He asked me what was the fastest 90-footer we could build. Having raced with several of the Orma 60 tris in France, I knew these very fast boats had evolved to being nearly as wide as their length. ‘So my answer to Fresh was clear to me:
a trimaran with the maximum length per- mitted by the Deed of Gift, and as wide –
90ft by 90ft.’ Other dimensions Kermarec suggested: 3ft draft with boards up; 20ft draft with daggerboards down… Even on paper it looked like an awesome beast. ‘In the technology of velocity-prediction
programmes,’ Ian Burns says, ‘Michel is simply the best I’ve ever seen. ‘He was convinced from the outset that
a trimaran would be superior to a cat. He based that on his experience designing big, all-purpose, round-the-world multihulls. It was a big decision because whatever we submitted was what we had to show up with on the starting line. ‘It was huge. And to his credit Michel
stood by his decision. He never wavered. During the campaign some of our guys would look over the fence and think Alinghi, with their catamaran, had it fig- ured out, and they’d wish we had a cat. But Michel always said we would be faster… never worse than equal and supe- rior across most conditions.’ But at that point no one really believed
a monster multihull would ever become a reality. The dimensions were submitted as a placeholder. Oracle always thought that after the court ruled on CNEV’s legitimacy the US team would be able to agree to a conventional, multi-challenger event with Alinghi. That proved impossible. Then came the Tribune de Genève
SEAHORSE 61
FRANK SOCHA
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