News Around the World
we were building. So I had a look with Don and it had hot and cold showers, plus refrigeration! No decision… A few months later we were racing on Sydney Harbour and the boys brought me up a cold drink – imagine that! All the winches were electric except the runners – but now they are electric too. Many guys are too bloody old to be near a full-on raceboat! Too
old and too slow! I am OK because I write the cheques! So I bought this R/P 52 knowing it would make a great club racing boat. It was commissioned by Michael Illbruck, and had never sailed, so we took it to Hamilton Island and it does 8.2kt upwind! It’s quick! It is 800kg heavier that a TP52 – but 300kg of that is in the bulb. So it is super- stiff and we won the ORC division at Hamilton last year. But with the latest raceboat I just wanted to get a really good
boat to be fully competitive in the class. It has probably been a bit tougher than I expected but 90 per cent of the time we finish first. I think we needed the lightest, strongest, fastest boat – and I think they have delivered on that. Then the handicapper has his say… But I also have some great sailors onboard. What has helped is
we had a bit of a reset. We tightened up on our discipline – if the plan is off the dock at 09.00 that happens. Then a debrief at night followed by a briefing the following morning. With new and different inputs, it shakes things up and that is a positive. Victor Kovalenko has been coaching me for 20 years – as we
know he is an outstanding coach. My coach boat is called Victor K. I never had a coach before Victor, I remember him taking us out on the Dragon… we learned more in two hours than we would have learnt in a month with anybody else. I also had a bit of help from the legendary coach Mike Fletcher back in the Farr 40 days. A very special person. But Victor being the most positive individual I know has impacted on all my sailing – and on much else in my life. With these TP52s it is not a walk in the park. This boat has all
the potential in the world, we just have to sail it well. One of the challenges has been that I have had two really refined boats. Now I have one straight out of the factory and it has taken us until now to improve – but we still haven’t learnt how to sail the boat effectively. One significant advantage is our tactician now produces a book
of incredible data for us. Sure, the Super Series guys do this all the time, but this is another level of performance data for us. Honestly I don’t understand a lot of this, but all the guys do! Just as well… When I first spoke to Adolfo about design he asked me what was
my goal for this boat. I want to win Hamilton Island Race Week six times. I have won it five times – nobody has done that, although Karl Kwok has come close. We were unlucky this year but, like I said, it isn’t a walk in the park. You just have to keep on moving forwards and it will happen. Blue Robinson
32 SEAHORSE
USA One to remember It’s been a long time since the ORC partnered with a host club to run a World Championship in the US… 24 years to be exact since the IMS Worlds were held at New York Yacht Club in Newport. The rating system was not at its finest in those IMS days, with rule makers consistently half a step behind the designers. The other key difference was at that event there were separate
Worlds titles for the Racer and Cruiser/Racer divisions. This intro- duced another exploitation opportunity, one that was taken full advantage of by the likes of Vincenzo Onorato with his custom Farr 42 ‘cruiser-racer’ Mascalzone Latino, much to the chagrin of the more traditional dual-purpose boats popular in that era. This time the boats were a similar mix of production and custom
designs, but now the Performance and Racer/Cruiser categories are mixed together – and have been for the past decade or more. The size and rated speed of the entries in this event, however,
showed an inverted distribution compared to Europe. Whereas the ORC Europeans in Finland this summer had one Class 0 entry that then had to be combined into Class A, with an increasing number of entries with smaller and slower designs in Classes B and C, here in Newport there was the opposite distribution. Class A was the largest class with 19 entries and Class B had 14 entries, with the handful of Class C entries folded into Class B. This calls into question if the CDL class splits refined for the
European fleets (which in turn are different between the Baltic and the Med!) are appropriate for the fleet in North America. This will be a hot topic in the forthcoming autumn meetings: are fixed goal posts better to allow for targets in design and optimisation, or should organisers be allowed a free hand crafting classes for whoever wants to race in their particular region? The former provides easy guidance for event organisers, but the
latter has been the traditional approach in the US and may well pro- duce better racing. No easy answers to this. As for optimisation and design, unsurprisingly the most devel-
opment pressure was applied in this year’s new Class 0, composed of the fleet’s fastest boats, the TP (and TP-ish) 52s. We’re all familiar with how these boats have proved amazingly competitive in all three major competitive modes – inshore box-rule racing in the 52 Super Series and inshore/offshore racing under IRC or ORC. The gold medal team in this class was Victor Wild’s Botín 52 Fox
2.0, which had been built for this event four years ago at the same venue but that was postponed due to Covid. Since then the team has been full-focus optimising their boat, the sail programme and their crew choreography towards winning this event. For Fox this started a few years ago when the boat was new racing
PAUL TODD/OUTSIDE IMAGES
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