There’s a lot of Luna Rossa’s AC75s about the quite moderate hull shape of Roberto Lacorte’s new Mark Mills ‘Maxi’, with a healthy dose of Team New Zealand’s Cup defender Te Rehutai dropped on top, lowering the rig and generating those familiar crewing pods. Roberto Lacorte loves his yachting and he loves new ideas… the ideal candidate to build the first such boat for mainstream racing. The hull (left) at first glance is just a blue AC75 – before you absorb that big lump of lead underneath to avoid total offshore insanity
there are already other similar boats either under construction or in development. The building of traditional high-performance Mini Maxis is now at a standstill precisely because a great leap forward is expected with a new generation of Maxi foiling. Many owners watched the AC75s and they too now want to start flying on the water. Not only that, our project was born with
the intention of being replicable. In fact, the construction budget is even slightly lower than that of a Maxi72 – for a finished boat in the water ready to race. Having said that, another of the aspects that most intrigues me about the FlyingNikka project is that of being a pioneer, of doing new things. For me it is a real pleasure. During our interview Lacorte is joined by
the FlyingNikka team manager, Alessio Razeto of North Sails Italy, so we take the opportunity to ask him about the sails. Seahorse:Will the wardrobe be smaller given this boat will usually be sailing in very high apparent wind speeds? Alessio Razeto: Certainly. There are fewer sails… although most are a bit special being engineered to often sail with 50kt of apparent! The structure will therefore be critical: at the bow we will use North Helix structural luff designs. Unfortu- nately in IRC (and ORC) the mainsail can- not be double-skinned as in the Cup, but it does benefit from the wider lessons of the
AC75s – indeed, one of our sail designers is Marco Capitani of Luna Rossa. For sail- ing offshore attention must also be paid to achieving acceptable performance in dis- placement mode, even if the expectation is to remain on the foils as much as possible. SH: And the mast… AR: We are starting with a Southern Spars rotating mast but with some quite special - ised characteristics. We took some small risks with the rig, but they supported us throughout and we are confident with the final result. Of course, there is strong inter- action with the sail designs because both teams come together using the same soft- ware: this is a good synergy which then translates into producing all of the aerody- namic matrices. These then interact with the Gomboc software to formulate the VPP – a fundamental loop that helps us to define the bigger technical choices quite quickly. SH: Can you also tell us a little more about the Gomboc software? AR: Gomboc was originally developed by Team New Zealand lead designer Dan Bernasconi and his group; to date it is the only software that can deliver foiling VPPs with a reasonable degree of reliability and accuracy. I think we were among the first to use it outside the Cup. We bought two licences, a ‘Designer’ model and also a ‘Crew’ model that we are using to simulate manoeuvres, to create a playbook as we
identify the new crew sequences. Other AC teams also agreed that the
tool had been a reliable predictor of per- formance in Auckland… as we saw with the result! Note that the various simulators the teams use to train ashore are mostly now based on the Gomboc system. SH: A big one this, Roberto… what are your expectations regarding rating? Do ORC and IRC even have the tools to calculate something sensible for you? Roberto Lacorte: Since the genesis of the project we have worked closely with ORC who hope to use our performances to check their first flying VPPs, then refine them. Initially we neither expect nor particu-
larly care about a favourable rating; we are not interested in adding to the workload of the rating staff. We are interested in help- ing them to develop an evaluation system that is as correct and as fair as possible. As for IRC, they have also been tracking
us carefully through their role as the rating managers of the Maxi association (IMA). However, because I am currently the vice- president of the IMA I prefer not to play too active a role because it could be seen as a conflict of interest. In any case we need an IRC rating because it is required by the NoR for Maxi regattas, but we are not interested in corrected time results, as I already mentioned. This project is aimed 100 per cent at line honours.
SEAHORSE 55
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