Money where mouth is… Andrew ‘Amac’ McDougall testing the Mach 2.6 on a cold winter’s day at Black Rock in Melbourne
The sum of the parts
As always chatting to Andrew McDougall is a delight, the conversation crackling with energy, on getting feedback from 12- year-olds foiling on Waszps in Norway, to some of the lightbulb moments with this latest evolution of the Mach 2. What he is deeply proud of with the new Mach 2.6 is creating a reliable, fast Moth that is opti- mised for normal conditions – for a regatta experiencing 6-12kt, or from 10 to 18kt but that is still reasonably optimised for an event that runs from 18 to 25kt. The new 2.6 has the capability to be optimised further for these conditions, but McDougall reasons how many events do you go to where it blows this hard for an entire week? And, crucially, the Mach 2.6 sells for two-thirds the price of its elite semi-custom competitors.
There will soon be some very familiar
names sailing his latest boat and it will be fascinating to see how it performs across the range of conditions against the compe- tition. Interesting times ahead.
Rig
Having already shortened the mast of the Mach 2.4 for the now dominant deck- sweeper rig, McDougall went slightly shorter again with the 2.6 mast, now built in high-modulus carbon pre-preg, softer in the tip and stiffer in the bottom to reflect the direction the class is now going. What he has focused on is something
that is more all-round, to get you up foiling and then take you comfortably up to 25kt. In McDougall parlance, ‘There is nothing specifically special here, but everything has been throughly looked at.’ The pre-preg high-modulus boom, like
all Mach 2.6 components, is also auto- claved, and so is stiffer and now slightly longer. But the biggest recent gains above deck are in refining the sail – and specifi- cally working on the battens. McDougall’s team have been making
their own carbon batten tubes in a mould specifically for their own super-successful KA sails, offering four different tube stiff- nesses; these battens are a hybrid of carbon tube and fibreglass rod, which gives KA Sails a significant ability to create many different levels of stiffnesses. The battens feature two different carbon
tubes but then using fibreglass at the front; somewhat surprisingly they have made huge leaps downwind by making the back half of the battens super-stiff combined with the relatively softer front half… which McDougall didn’t expect at all. ‘I think that because we are going so
fast through the water some of the old thinking, including some of my own old thinking, has held us back – of looking at the attachment at the front of the sail in the old way, where you have to be driving off the leech. Looked at afresh, it has proved to be so much faster to really push the knuckle into the front to get that flow really attached, then the back becomes about making the front work. Just as the top of the sail is really only there to make the bottom of the sail work, it turns out the back of the sail is really only there to make the front of the sail work…’ McDougall and his team have been
using their current sail material for a long time, a key point being their use of carbon reinforcement strips, allowing them to have a relatively basic sail cloth yet create all the stiffness they need. Over time they have refined the process, laying these carbon strips to get exactly the deformation they want, getting the top of the sail to lay off yet keeping the middle stable. These itera- tive refinements have combined to make their deck-sweeper rigs highly competitive. Before finishing on sails a lot of work has been done on the camber inducers to
SEAHORSE 49
PHOTOS KA SAIL/DREW MALCOLM
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