The fastest 25 footer in the World

Steve Clark discusses his C-Class Little America's Cup winner, Cogito

Aside from his activities as Chairman of Vanguard Sailboats (see his views on the dinghy market - part 1 and part 2), Steve Clark is best known for being the most recent winner of the Little America’s Cup aboard the world’s fastest 25 foot sailboat - Cogito.

The Little America's Cup traditionally has been raced in C-Class catamarans. One of four catamaran classes originally conceived by ISAF's predecessor, the International Yacht Racing Union, the C-Class simply limits maximum length to 25ft, maximum beam to 14ft and sail area to 300sqft.

While the B-Class effectively become the Tornado, the C-Class came of age when in 1961 it was chosen for the first match between America and the UK for the International Catamaran Challenge Trophy, latterly known by its more popular name the Little America's Cup, due to its challenge and defender series and the ultimate match race between the winners of these two series.

Over the years the Little America's Cup has been contested hotly by teams from the US, the UK and Australia as well as Denmark, France and Italy as the boats being sailed have become increasingly extreme. This is particularly true of the rigs, which have evolved from softsails, to aerofoil-profile rotating spars to hybrid wingmasts and softsails to solid wingsails and on to the present generation of multi-element wingsails. There have also been a number of departures from this evolution albeit largely unsuccessful ones - to see how C-Class catamarans have evolved see Christian Fevrier's unique photo galleries on this subject - part 1 and part 2.

In 1985 a new era in the Little America's Cup dawned when the Australians aboard Victoria 150 prised the Little America's Cup off the American Patient Lady VI team (emulating Alan Bond's victory two years earlier in the 'big' America's Cup - or the 'slow' America's Cup as Randy Smyth once dubbed it). So began a 11 year run for the team led by Lindsay Cunningham, fending off challenges from the British team The Hinge in 1987, a Californian team with Wingmill in 1989 and another US team with Freedom's Wing in 1991.

In 1996 Steve Clark turned this round pitching up with a highly professional team incorporating some of the best technicians in the business brought together to conceive the ultimate C-Class catamaran of the day. Cogito, sailed by Duncan MacLane and Erich Chase, decisively beat Cunningham's latest incarnation of The Edge in four races, including one in which the Australian catamaran capsized demolishing her wing.

For both Clark and Cunningham there was a degree of family honour at stake - both their fathers had campaigned C-Class catamarans in the heyday of the Little America's Cup. In the end Clark invested around $500,000, spent it in the right places and brought the Little America's Cup back to the US. Since then and until this year the Little America's Cup had gone quiet, so quiet in fact that the trustees of the International Catamaran Challenge Trophy decided to transform it into a competition for one design Formula 18s. Typically at the almost exact same time two challenges for Cogito emerged - one from Australia, the other from the UK.

So why the seven year silence? Did Clark raise the game too high in the process? "Before I did that everyone said that about Lindsay Cunningham," Clark counters. "Before they said that about Lindsay Cunningham they said it about Patient Lady and before that about Miss Nylex and before that Quest III. They said it about Team New Zealand until they said it about Alinghi and you know what? Alinghi is havable...

"But 'how high did I raise the bar?' is an interesting question... Duncan [MacLane- who was also principle designer of Cogito] and I had done this before. We’d lost 10 years previously in a boat that I’d built which wasn’t good enough - Patient Lady VI."

"She started out good enough but by the time we got to the event she wasn’t good enough. A bunch of things went wrong in her management. I was a vendor to the thing. Tony [DiMauro - who ran the Patient Lady dynasty that held the LAC from 1977] in particular made a bunch of decisions that added weight and there were some tuning things we didn't know we had a problem about and they bit us bad.

"And the problem with a quick four race series, is that by the time you know you’ve got a problem it is too late. Because you go and get punched out once. Then you think ‘well...that was interesting. Do we think we have a problem or did we have a bad race?” So you go out and race again. The second one is closer. The third one you have a disaster, you break something. Then there’s heroics gluing it back together and you lose the last race by 50 seconds - that was us against Victoria 150."

In the 11 years the Australians held the Cup, the dogmatic Cunningham built four boats each one an improvement on the last. Meanwhile after a break from the event Clark was spurred into action by the death of Tony DiMauro. "He was the centre of gravity of the whole Patient Lady team," says Clark. "I didn’t feel like I could poach Duncan or do any of that stuff while Tony was around."

So began one of the most inspiring - and costly - episodes in Clark's sailing career. He recounts how they put the Cogito campaign together: "We decided to do it. We know what we did [with Patient Lady VI] and we can speculate that they [Cunningham's team] are here. So what do we have to do to get there? We study what we have to do. And we have to take 25% of the weight out of our best previous boat [ Patient Lady VI]. So you go out and do all the stuff you know you have to do.

"In terms of building the boat, the best stuff we ever built in the Patient Lady years was when Tony had Skip Banks and Terry Richards working for him in the basement of this building, building stuff. If you are involved in motor sport, you own a garage with two or three of the best mechanics you can find to get the best work done and they are just in the background of your challenge building cars all the time.

"So I have a barn at home big enough to build a C-Class catamaran in. I hire Henry Elliott who is leaving GMT [Goetz Marine Technologies] and who is the most meticulous builder I know of. And Erich Chase, who is another very very good craftsmen. And we set up and started running the project.

"Then we did those things that you would normally do in a competitive sailing program: You actually get the thing built enough ahead of time so that you can figure out how to sail it and get it reliable - you debug it so that it works. And you drag it around and go to the venue far enough ahead of time, so that you know what you are doing there and you know what the shifts look like and away you go."

Clark says that one attraction to C-Class campaigns is that they have all the elements to it - design, construction, project management, team management and sailing aspects. "And it happens at a scale that is portable," he adds. "The object isn't huge - it’s light, folds up, it goes in a 40ft container, it does all of those things and it’s right on the cusp."

The $500k war chest, he confirms, but says that figure included everything over a period of two and a half years: "soup to nuts, including buying stuff that hangs around like inflatable chase boats, a hangar and a bunch of stuff, table saws for the work shop. In our sport that is not a hell of a lot of money. That is three C-Class catamarans including buying Tony’s old boats so we had something to play against to find out if we were making progress or not." To give Patient Lady VI a comparible performance they added 10-15% of extra sail area to the back of her wing.

"So how high did we raise the bar? We built a pretty nice boat and we sailed it pretty well. We didn't do a Dennis Conner and build two boats. We didn’t build three wings, we just built one complete boat. We could have spent a lot more!

"NASA wasn’t involved. We did no wind tunnel work - Lindsay did wind tunnel work. And you sit there and say ‘they’ll grouse about how much more we spent then they did. And I’ll say 'you built four boats. I built one. To get the 10 years of development you did, you’ve got to pay for all of that too. And your fourth boat cost a lot less than my first boat.'"

Additionally Clark says that if he had lost to Cunningham in 1996 he was prepared to return for a second crack. "In a seven race series and you blow up in one - what would you do? If it was close it would be very tempting to leave the boat there. 'We are going to go home and build four new pieces and we'll see you next year'. And winter south of Melbourne is not a bad deal!

"One of the things I was trying to do in the cost control exercise, was to be able to do it for a while. I was less successful at that than I wanted to be, but the idea was not to stick all the eggs in one basket and be done after one attempt." He adds that it may have been the first occasion that he had run the show, but it was not the first time he or Duncan had been involved with LAC campaigns.

Cogito as a sailing vessel is impressive in every aspect. It's engineering is immaculate, the design of its wing works and is relatively simple compared to Cunningham's more complex creations. Clark and MacLane achieved their weight targets. The boat hit the scales at 380lb - compared to Patient Lady VI which had begun life at 485lb and ultimately ended up at 510 ten years earlier.

The result is one of the most efficient sailing catamarans in existence - this is not so obvious in ultimate speed but in her efficiency and acceleration. "It is not how fast you go - it’s how soon you go fast," confirms Clark. "The fastest we saw on the steam gauge was 23 knots but it is how soon you see 15 knots - which you see in 8 knots of breeze. Most normal days you go sailing, you go upwind at 12.5-13 knots, reaching close to 20 and go downwind at 16-17 knots. The upwind and downwind angles are all inside 90degrees and if you removed the sail area restriction you’d go faster downwind. That is the lesson proven by Stars & Stripes - downwind sail area is just the raw thing.

One problem was how to measure her performance and Clark feels there is more to be done in area. In the development of Cogito they didn't get as far as getting true wind data on board, but did reprogram a Trimble GPS chip to coax out the numbers they were looking for. "After the 1991 Gulf War if you can stuff a bomb down a sewer pipe, you should be able to tell how fast a sail boat is going," says Clark.

Clark is aware that Cogito is not the last word in C-Class catamarans particularly considering the leaps in technology that have been made since the mid-1990s.

"Duncan is a really good designer, but he is a numbers-driven engineer," says Clark. "We were engineering the thing as we went along. You have got computers and design software now that makes what we were using 10 years ago seem like the stone age.

"When I built Patient Lady VI there were two ovens on the East Coast big enough to put a 25ft hull in. Now I’ve got one in my barn, that is packed up and folded away!"

Clark says he has ideas about how he would develop Cogito but he has made a policy decision to run Cogito as she was in 1996 when she meets her Australian and British challengers next year. "That's not me being cheap. We know right now what we would do".

Clark says that the technology involved in C-Class catamarans is not that rarified. There are a number of proficient designers capable of creating one. Unlike the big America's Cup he and his team have gone to some lengths to put the development work they put in on Cogito out into the public domain and says he will happily show potential challengers his boat. "We tried hard to make a open book about what it is you have to do. We are not being secretive and defensive here," says Clark, adding with ironic smile, "we may be irrelevant!"

Since returning from Australia Cogito has spent most of her life boxed up in a container in Clark's garden. She's made a few outings. One was the Unlimited Regatta in Newport where she encountered Dennis Conner's softsail Stars & Stripes catamaran. They lost to the 55ft cat but only by around 10 seconds, although Clark admits Conner was not using his big genniker.

Aside from this Clark says he hasn't sailed Cogito in 4-5 years. "She is fairly specific tool for a fairly specific job. Given that I was going to want to use her again and not spend a lot of money it seemed that the useful thing was not to take her out of the box. There are few races worthy of the mount. One of the things we were trying to figure out was that if this whole International Catamaran Challenge Trophy goes away, what is worth doing with this toy? What else do you use it for?

The Bol d'Or might be pretty exciting. But the stuff she'd be going up against as so sorted for their environment. Altair got blown apart by those guys and she was a pretty special device. She is awfully small little boat, but won’t finish far behind them, but the big problem is that the mark at the other end of the lake is so far in on the beach that something which isn’t 90ft tall won’t get around the mark – you’d have to paddle. The gusts you could deal with. The thunder storms might be scary. Altair came to grief in a thunderstorm in the middle of the night."

Tomorrow Clark gives his thoughts about the extraordinary wing rigs used by the latest C-Class catamarans.