Design


Now for some sport!


Claes Eliasson, lead designer Maurizio Cossutti and the Bavaria Yachts team all agreed that now is the time for something a bit different…


Have you ever sailed a cruising yacht and wondered how much faster it might be with a good set of racing sails – and with some of the heavy cruising equipment removed? Claes Eliasson, a Norwegian dealer for Bavaria Yachts and a keen club racing sailor, is leading a team with a mission to find out. Cruisers are of course designed to have a high load-carrying capacity and the best ones sail fairly well even when heavily laden with optional extras like bathing platforms, bow thrusters and cockpit tables. But what if the typical options budget was instead devoted to boosting the boat’s performance? How much difference would that actually make? You need the right boat to start off with. Some cruisers have far more scope for performance optimisation than others, and Eliasson knew that he had a good candidate for the project he had in mind when the naval architect Maurizio Cossutti showed him the plans for the Bavaria C42. That boat went on to win the


66 SEAHORSE


European Yacht Of The Year Award, on the strength of its sailing performance, but Eliasson ended up using its smaller sister, the C38 – Cossutti's most recent design for Bavaria – as his test boat. The C38 and C42 share five key design features that define their sailing characteristics. ‘It’s the sailplan, the high volume V-bow, the chine, the tight buttock lines, the keel shape,’ says Cossutti’s design partner Alessandro Ganz. ‘A combination of factors deliver the good performance and handling.’ ‘This hull and the boat as a whole have potential for good results in club racing,’ Eliasson says. ‘Together with North Sails and Cossutti, we are interested in finding out whether it is worth offering sport versions of the Bavaria C38 and C42. So we ordered a standard boat from the yard without a bathing platform, cockpit table or bow thruster, which saved quite a lot of weight. We made some minor modifications locally. The sails are custom made and


Above: Claes Eliasson’s Bavaria C38 has been


optimised for club racing with input from an


all-star team that includes Cossutti


Yacht Design and North Sails Norway. The early results are impressive and further performance gains are expected this season


Cossutti has been helping us with design and development.’ It would be easy (although expensive) to demonstrate impressive performance gains by ripping out the interior of a standard production boat, adding a deeper keel, fitting water ballast and replacing the regular rig with high aspect, high modulus carbon to create the seagoing equivalent of a World Rally Championship racer. But that would go against the ethos of Eliasson’s project, which aims to show the full performance potential of a normal Bavaria C38 with the sort of optimisation that an average owner could realistically achieve, in partnership with a local sailmaker, while preserving the true essence of the boat as a well-equipped and fully functional family cruiser. The project kicked off in January 2021. The boat was delivered in May and the team began tuning and applying a modest series of upgrades. ‘We were all curious to see how well the C38 could perform


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64  |  Page 65  |  Page 66  |  Page 67  |  Page 68  |  Page 69  |  Page 70  |  Page 71  |  Page 72  |  Page 73  |  Page 74  |  Page 75  |  Page 76  |  Page 77  |  Page 78  |  Page 79  |  Page 80  |  Page 81  |  Page 82  |  Page 83  |  Page 84  |  Page 85  |  Page 86  |  Page 87  |  Page 88  |  Page 89  |  Page 90  |  Page 91  |  Page 92  |  Page 93  |  Page 94  |  Page 95  |  Page 96  |  Page 97  |  Page 98  |  Page 99  |  Page 100  |  Page 101  |  Page 102  |  Page 103  |  Page 104  |  Page 105  |  Page 106  |  Page 107  |  Page 108  |  Page 109  |  Page 110  |  Page 111  |  Page 112  |  Page 113  |  Page 114  |  Page 115  |  Page 116  |  Page 117  |  Page 118  |  Page 119  |  Page 120  |  Page 121  |  Page 122  |  Page 123  |  Page 124