boat fundamentally doesn’t foil or work in any form of sea state, then if you do fall off you get hit by the rudder. It’s just not worth the risk of training. So there’s a fundamental problem that
needs resolving. And I know the class is currently testing rudders further inboard, they’re doing it in Weymouth and we’re waiting to hear back from the class as to what they recommend moving forward. SH: So at the moment the Nacra 17 is not sailable in any kind of large seaway? NO: Taking boats like this onto open water is just problematic. Even somewhere like Palma is probably not a great place to sail them with the waves you can get there. Then there’s Hyères which can really cut up. So now you’re looking at venues like Lake Garda, Weymouth Harbour, Sydney Harbour, Auckland. Anywhere that has protected harbours is a good venue for these foiling boats. You take the AC50 in Bermuda, a great boat inside the Great Sound, but you take it out through the Hauraki Gulf, maybe not so good. You’ve got to have a boat that’s fit for purpose for those venues or the whole thing is a mess. SH: Surely the Holy Grail for foil design is to create a form of foiling that can cope with varying sea states… NO: If you’re asking me what can be done to make the boat safer to sail I think we should be looking at what’s going on with the A-Class. I’m jumping in once a year to find out about the latest designs. Every year, even though there’s no active control system on that boat, the flight control gets better and better. The number of iterations of design that
they do in them is unbelievable. I think the foils that we use in the Nacra 17 are based on the foil shape of an A-Class from about 2015 when the Z-foil first appeared in the class. Things have come on huge amounts since then, to the point where the A-Cat is now foiling better upwind than it does downwind… The flight control, the man- agement of the ride height is unbelievable compared to what we currently have on the Nacra. So, in my opinion, the first thing that
you should do to improve the safety and also the performance of the Nacra 17 would be to put in a new set of dagger- boards with a more suitable section shape that is better for ventilation, and manages ride height better so that it performs much more efficiently in waves. Right now, if you’re in waves in a Nacra, you’re in a bit of trouble… SH: Foil shapes are quite a controversial subject in the fleet at the moment. You put in that protest against the Italians on the final day of Enoshima… NO: The day before the final day of racing we were sitting around and the Italians’ foils were out in view, where normally we don’t get a chance to look at them. For sure the Italians are one of the quickest boats in the fleet, so we were keen to have a look at their equipment. And I noticed that they had had some substantial sanding happening to
56 SEAHORSE
Team Outteridge Tokyo 2020… hopefully. Nathan Outteridge already has gold and silver medals from the 2012 and 2016 Olympics respectively in the 49er while Haylee made it up to no5 in the 49erFX rankings but missed out on the New Zealand slot for Rio 2016
them, so I went a little bit closer and had a really good look. And it looked as if they’d sanded through parts of the foil, right through the carbon-fibre weave in fact. And so I had a really good read of the
class rules that evening along with our coach Darren Bundock. The class rules are written such that if it doesn’t say you can do it, then you can’t do it… just like it is for the Lasers. The rule on foil maintenance and sand-
ing says you’re allowed to paint and sand the outermost skin of the daggerboard, to maintain it, to stop it getting scratched, to make sure that it’s in good condition, as long as you don’t change the effective shape of the foil. From what I saw I thought that they’d sanded parts of the carbon fibre in certain areas of the board which in my opinion would change the effective shape of the foil. Hence why I put in the protest. SH: But the protest was dismissed. What were the conclusions of the jury? NO: The jury got one of the international measurers there to measure the Italian foils along with some sample foils from throughout the fleet. So we had 10 sets of foils provided to the measurer. He took some sample measurements of the thick- nesses of the foils in the section where the sanding had taken place and his findings were presented to the jury. They said that the thicknesses of their foils compared to the samples taken from the rest of the fleet, including our own foils, were within 0.2mm. So very, very small differences. However, he didn’t have good enough
calipers to measure further in than 25- 30mm from the trailing edge. So he didn’t get a chance to measure any other sections of the foil. And obviously with a limited amount of time he couldn’t do a thorough
measurement to give any further comment. So the jury decided that, based on this lack of further evidence, even though it was clear that the sanding had gone through the carbon-fibre weave, they hadn’t changed the effective shape of the foil. SH:How satisfied were you with the outcome… NO: I was satisfied in one way, because at least I understand how they plan on inter- preting the class rules. One of the things I did say to the measurers and class repre- sentatives was that the class rules are cur- rently too vague; they’re not clear enough on what you can and can’t do for foil ‘maintenance’. The protest was more about trying to
understand: are you allowed to do what they’ve done, or are you not? The last thing we want is large differences in foils determining who wins regattas and mak- ing for an arms race – which it could potentially become if this isn’t resolved. The faster the boat goes the more
important these tiny details become. If the thickness to chord ratio, say on a Laser, is out by one or two per cent, it’s not going to be the difference between a gold medal and coming 20th. Whereas if your foil on your Nacra is not the right shape by one or two per cent, or the leading edge is not the correct profile or the trailing edge is too fat, we’re talking about knots of boatspeed downwind. If you have the ability to sand and
change the shape of your foils, or even go to the sails, for example, and change the luff curve on your one-design mainsail, you can start making performance gains. These are ongoing problems that need to be addressed by a tighter set of rules. And while the foils may be relatively recent the Nacra is far from being a new class… q
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