This’ll cost you! After losing twice with his previous skipper Chris Dickson Larry Ellison finally manages to lure Russell Coutts to his Cup team after the 2007 defeat in Valencia. Coutts has already fallen out of love with Alinghi but until this point he has been securely tied to the Swiss team with a non-compete clause. But the Ellison-Coutts partnership was always going to happen and sure enough Coutts was the best possible person to steer Ellison through the ensuing DoG technical war in which limitless financial resources were not matched by an unlimited amount of time. The best prioritising of expenditure of both key resources is always a Cup winner
headline: ‘Alinghi will defend in a multi- hull.’ [That is how Alinghi shared its deci- sion to have a DoG race – in multihulls]. The button had been pressed, the green
lights were flashing, alarm claxons going off. Nevertheless there was a brief moment before the full-out, two-year scramble of design, building and sailing began – and before the legal battles continued – when every part of BMW Oracle Racing paused to deplore the implications of a DoG race. There were at least 10 other teams,
roughly 1,000 people, not counting sub- contractors, who had been made redun- dant by a single Swiss newspaper headline. Ten America’s Cup teams would be either shut down or reduced to a skeleton staff while they waited for Alinghi and BMW Oracle to conclude their business. It was not a good moment for the subculture that revolves around the America’s Cup. America’s Cup 32 in Valencia in 2007,
with 12 (sic) teams competing, had seemed to get the contest for the oldest trophy in sport back on track after the interminable, weather-delayed and one-sided set of races in Auckland in 2000. Momentum for fans – and sponsors – was building. And now this. ‘There was an aura of disbelief in the shop when we were told the 90ft tri was a reality,’ said Tim Smyth, the co-head of Oracle Racing’s Core Builders in Anacortes, Washington. Smyth started life with degrees in
economics and politics. Before he knew it he was sailing with a yachtsman he’d met in London who decided to build a new
62 SEAHORSE
Admiral’s Cup boat in Spain. Smyth, who had built a couple of canoes with his father, pitched in and enjoyed it. And he was good at it. ‘It was a typical Kiwi story,’ Smyth says. ‘Go forth, travel over- seas and see what happens to you!’ Quite a bit happened to Smyth. With his
new Spanish connections and a twist of fate Smyth ended up building Spain’s America’s Cup yachts for the 1989–92 campaign. He followed that with a One Tonner for Juan Carlos, the king of Spain, before building several Whitbread, then Volvo 60s. In 2001 Smyth moved to Washington State and began building boats for Larry Ellison. ‘We all believed in our hearts it was
going to be a 90ft monohull,’ Smyth says now. ‘We knew it would be exciting to do a trimaran but, bloody hell, it would be huge. And there were other ramifications. The elimination of the other teams would leave a bad taste in all our mouths. It wasn’t something we wanted to happen. We were reluctant planners, if you like.’
BMW Oracle Racing 90 But the turn had been called, and BMW Oracle Racing came out of the blocks like a class-A dragster, with wheels smoking. But, unlike a dragster, the trimaran had a bit more than a quarter of a mile ahead of it. With the basic decision to build a tri-
maran having been made, the Oracle team turned to the design firm of VPLP (naval architects Marc Van Peteghem and Vin- cent Lauriot Prévost) in France. VPLP had
enormous, successful, broad experience with multihulls, having done everything from 30-60ft racing multis to the eye- popping 138ft luxury cruising multihull, Douce France. There had also been some even larger maxi racing multihulls along the way so the structural challenges involved in a trimaran on this scale were largely but not entirely new. On the competitive side, VPLP is prob -
ably best known for the Groupama series of boats, from championship-winning 60ft ‘sprint’ trimarans to a Jules Verne-winning three-hulled giant. In both cases French- man Franck Cammas was regularly their skipper. With time of the essence, and the only design parameters being to come up with a boat for an unknown venue with unknown wind conditions and an unknown sea state, the team decided on a scaled-up version of the lightweight Groupama concept. A brave call in itself. Design director Mike Drummond had
already been convinced the trimaran was faster in concept than the catamaran path followed by Alinghi. Drummond had been with Team New Zealand as structural designer and back-up navigator in the successful 1995 campaign. He also became involved on the performance side, helping to develop Velocity Prediction Programs (VPPs) on appendage design. In 2000, when TNZ successfully
defended the Cup, Drummond got more involved with the overall design of the yacht and came up with the concept for a new rig configuration that became
GILLES MARTIN-RAGET
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