Main picture: the winning Provezza Dragon crew approach the leeward mark in a big leftover swell during the 2017 worlds in Cascais. Today’s Dragon class would be largely unrecognisable to some of the class stalwarts of 20 years ago, with an influx of Olympians who can rely for technical and logistic support on a specialist international crew pool made up of professional sailors who have a good understanding of the Dragon and Etchells classes and who now earn a regular living splitting their services between the two. Top: a 1960s Pedersen Thuesen Dragon is scanned at Petticrows looking for improvements for the company’s own latest Version 6 design and (above) simple CFD hull modelling was used to help evaluate small variations (red) in hull surface. As with every highly developed one-design, there have always been the historic ‘fast era’ Dragon shapes, but repeating them in modern materials is not easy; there is still plenty of voodoo in one-design hull development. In spite of strenuous efforts to create a better Finn, mimicking his famous 2002-built Rita with modern materials, Ben Ainslie won all three of his Finn gold medals using his original boat (also built by Petticrows’ Tim Tavinor) which would briefly emerge from its peacetime home at the UK Maritime Museum for four-yearly outings
to the sport, the class and the competition. Clearly the Provezza family approach has now proved itself one of the more successful examples of ‘paying it forward’ to the next generation. What a wonderful opportunity to coach
a team of three great individuals who relish the idea of showing up fully prepared and focused each and every day and are always willing to put in all of the hard work neces- sary to compete, much more than just the 33 per cent required of each on paper. Andy Beadsworth, Ali Tezdiker and
Simon Fry possess ‘not just the will to win, but the will to prepare to win’ – if I may paraphrase one of my lifelong role models, John Wooden, the most successful UCLA basketball coach in history. That means committing themselves to putting in all the necessary work involved to achieve the
goal… that’s different from just desiring the obvious result. What I love most about this team is that they simply thrive on learning and improving every single day, they have a lot of fun getting better together and they’re big on giving back. Ali is a shining example of what can be
gained from experience with the Provezza family – and as soon as he set his goal of winning the 2017 worlds with Beadsworth and Fry onboard, the next phone call was to Tim Tavinor of Petticrows in the UK, the most successful Dragon builder over the past few decades.
The Petticrows V6 They say timing is everything, and for our team this was certainly the case as we were able to work with Tavinor, a past Dragon World Champion himself, who had just
begun the process of improving on his previous Version 5 Petticrows Dragon hull. Each version has been an evolution on the previous hull shape with designer Phil Morrison and another former Dragon World Champion Lawrie Smith (who ultimately finished a close third overall in the 2017 worlds sailing his new V6). They began researching improvements to
the hull, keel and rudder shapes, carefully studying aspects of Tavinor’s previous five designs, in addition taking enough time to learn everything that they could from some much earlier successful designs. Some of these famous older boats included
early designs from Pedersen Thuesen, from the 1950s and 1960s, several of which remain fast today in spite of the older build methods with their poorer hull gyrations. Morrison collated the initial comparative
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