How to win the Volvo Ocean Race pt2

James Boyd completes his review of 'how illbruck did it'

Continued from yesterday's article...

One of the few luxuries illbruck didn't take up was building two new boats like ASSA ABLOY, djuice and Nautor Challenges. "We talked about building a second boat," says Kostecki. "But we had the two older boats, we had more time and we could do a lot of the testing before we built the new boat. It's normally quite a scramble building two new boats. It's just a scramble to do testing then and keep the boats running".

Instead they had Irishman Killian Bushe and a team build a single new boat for them incorporating all the R&D and test work they had carried out. Bushe was chosen because he had constructed, Knut Frostad's Innovation Kvaerner, the lightest boat in the 1997/8 race.

For the sails, the team were equally meticulous. Sail designer Ross Halcrow was signed up for the campaign at the same time as Kostecki, but the team also got on board Rob Hook of North Sails PRG group who had been responsible for the EF sail development programme and who is now with OneWorld.

"We started off our sail development programme in April 2000," Halcrow told madfor sailing. Among other things, they were looking at Code Zeros where the mid-girth restriction from the previous race had been removed. "We got a lot of good sailing conditions in Spain. But it made sense to go to Australia to do some Southern Ocean testing and that's one of the reasons I think why we won the two Southern Ocean legs." Over the course of their training illbruck moved from Vigo to Perth, to Sydney (for the Sydney-Hobart and then ending up in Auckland) and then to Charleston, South Carolina.

Among the 100+ sails built for their campaign over four years, illbruck started the race with two special ones no one else had. One of the sails Halcrow was particularly impressed with was a Code Zero reacher they call the 'A0'. "It's a mylar sail with a wide range, but ideal for reaching in 20 knots. No one else started the race with one. In Miami they started getting them with a very wide range, but it took a long time to develop in the geometry and depth of the sail". John Kostecki added that this was particularly good because it had a tight luff that allowed it to be used when it was too rough to keep a spinnaker flying stably. It was also a winner at night. "At night in seaway you end up over trimming the spinnaker a lot, so at night with this spinnaker we were really fast with it, because you'd basically just cleat the thing off and sit up on the rail," said Kostecki.

Launched...thanks to the A0