The real champions of the 2010 Cup? When engineer Mike Drummond (far left) followed Russell Coutts to Oracle from Alinghi he was not expecting to be asked to build a giant trimaran of a scale never previously attempted – that must also be fast enough and reliable enough to win a Deed of Gift America’s Cup match… in a year’s time. Mark ‘Tugboat’ Turner (left) is the co-founder of ‘Godzilla’ trimaran builders Core Composites with Tim Smyth – bottom right with build manager Michel Marie. Marie now fills the same role with Ben Ainslie’s Ineos challenge
build all the multihull’s narrow elements. Turner and Smyth had figured it would
take 25,000 hours to build the latest version (version 5) of an 80ft monohull of the sort that had been used in the Cup since 1992. Divide by six months, the timeframe to have the boat sailing and they figured they’d need 22 builders. Now VPLP and associates told Core that it would take 18 months to build the trimaran they had just designed… Given the original October 2009 date
standard until America’s Cup 32 in 2007. Onboard, he split the navigation chores
with New Zealand’s celebrated Tom Schnackenberg. Drummond moved to Alinghi in 2007, where he worked with the design team in the role of ‘customer’, keeping tabs on the big picture. He was also involved in the development of 3Di sailcloth. Again he was navigator on the boat. He moved to Oracle Racing when he got a call from their new CEO Russell Coutts offering him the job of design director. ‘It sounded like a more interesting role,’
Drummond says. ‘I would have been repeating myself if I’d stayed with Alinghi. At Oracle I was free to put a design team together. It was a step forward.’ (After his fourth win Drummond was inducted into the America’s Cup Hall of Fame, in 2010.) But Drummond was a stranger to tri-
marans. ‘I’d been sailing an 18ft A-Class catamaran for three or four years,’ he says, ‘but never a tri.’ However, among those at Drummond’s
first design meeting were two Frenchmen with a whole world of multihull experi- ence. They were Michel Kermarec, who had produced the 90x90ft dimensions for the Challenger of Record submission, and Hervé Devaux, a structural engineer who had designed the composite structures for many of the big French multihulls. Devaux had also done the structural design for the outstanding wingmast on Stars & Stripes, the catamaran that won the Cup in 1988. ‘Devaux has good practical knowledge,
not just of structures,’ Drummond says, ‘but of how yachts behave and the loads they encounter. Kermarec’s proficiency with VPP studies and focus on appendages were invaluable. Both guys provided huge
strength for the team, largely based on their experience in the Orma 60 class.’ Drummond then adds,
‘And both
Devaux and Kermarec thought the tri would be faster. ‘The Orma 60 class is open to catama-
rans, but the tris are faster – they have been for years. Having a centre hull means you can carry forestay and mainsheet loads more efficiently. ‘A main hull with the volume distrib-
uted aft allows you to optimise that centre hull for slower speeds, at the same time pushing the volume forward in the floats for higher speeds when the main hull pro- gressively becomes less and less relevant. ‘Experience also tells you that trimarans
manoeuvre better, and have better sea- keeping ability in waves.’ Drummond figures the Alinghi side
went for a catamaran because that was where their experience lay. Ernesto Bertarelli and other Alinghi sailors had extensive experience racing superlight but powerful catamarans on the Swiss lakes. ‘The answers evolved,’ Drummond says. ‘Both teams improved hull shapes and
other technology and in doing so they redefined the modern multihull.’ Core Builders had been told to prepare
for building both a 90ft monohull and a 90x90ft multihull. As Tim Smyth wrote about the project in Seahorse magazine, ‘As the legal story unfolded we kept our heads down and pondered the best route to keep our options open!’ What Smyth and his Core Builders
co-founder Mark Turner did do was to enlarge their oven to accommodate a wide, 90ft monohull… which turned out to be a costly error. When the multihull was the call they had to live with the huge oven to
for the DoG match that was on paper in December 2008, when building com- menced Core had just eight months to complete their giant trimaran – referred to as BMW Oracle Racing 90 – to allow time for sailing trials, team practice and the inevitable modifications. The workforce would jump to 70 people, recruited from all over the world. ‘Work permits, accom- modation, furniture, schooling and reloca- tion became as big a part of the job as fibre selection and test panel work,’ Tim Smyth wrote in Seahorse. He says the massive rigging loads on the
trimaran and the extra-large appendages (daggerboards, rudders) meant laminates of extraordinary thickness and complex- ity. The amount of material Core used to build the trimaran would have been suffi- cient to build five version-5 ACC yachts. ‘Then the design team went off to
Valencia and put their heads together and decided we could bring the build pro- gramme up another two months and launch the boat in early July,’ Smyth says. The memory causes him to put his head in his hands. ‘The marketing team got all excited — hey, we could launch it on the Fourth of July! ‘We got served up this fait accompli,
and at first we believed it. We believed it for 10 long days until the sheer, ridiculous impossibility of the situation dawned on us. We said no way. That was a big deal for our team. They got a bit of a wobble on. But we had done some soul-searching and realised it wasn’t humanly possible to build this thing in six months. The French said 18 months. We were doing it in eight. Now six? No way.’ In Part II – crossing the divide
Learning to Fly will be available on Amazon from 1 December 2020 as a soft cover print edition with black & white photographs, and as an eBook in full colour. It will also be available as an iBook at Apple Books
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