IRCing TP52s

If there is such a thing as ‘good value’ in these circles, about as close to it as you can come in big boat racing at the moment is acquiring a secondhand TP52 from the Audi MedCup circuit. Several canny owners have been quick to jump on this bandwagon - Benny Kelly was the first, buying the early Farr design Beau Geste (one of the few Transpac 52s to have actually sailed in the Transpac - in 2003 with original owner Karl Kwok). Kelly’s Panthera was the recent winner of Stanford Antigua Sailing Week. Another early adopter was top Irish owner Colm Barrington who added to his impressive collection of racing yachts with Michael Illbruck’s second generation MedCup boat Pinta, now called Flash Glove. Carphone Warehouse boss Charles Dunstone has been wooed back into yacht racing, originally buying the TP52 built by Richie Faulkner for the first MedCup season (although it never made it out of the UK) and naming it Red. In March this year Red was passed on to the John Merricks Trust and it is now being sailed by a youth team from the Volvo RYA Keelboat Program. For this year Dunstone has replaced Red with Rio, the Judel-Vrolijk designed Stay Calm that Stuart Robinson campaigned during his second season on the MedCup circuit. Robinson himself bowed out of the MedCup circuit last year, but has hung on to his original Farr-designed Stay Calm (that he campaigned in 2006) and intends to campaign this in the UK this year - in addition to the Swan 70 he sails in the Caribbean and Mediterranean. But probably the heaviest hitter to join the exclusive UK TP52 club this season is Swede Niklas Zennstrom, one of the co-founders of Skype who has acquired Eamon Conneely’s former Patches 2 and renamed it