Volvo update

The Daily Sail cornered CEO Glenn Bourke and Race Director Andy Hindley to get the latest from the round the world race

The last few months have been busy ones for Volvo Ocean Race CEO Glenn Bourke and Race Director Andy Hindley as they try and put the pieces together for their new look round the world race.

With a little over two years to go until the start, the VO70 rule is to be launched in its full glory next month. At present Volvo have around 70 'interested parties' registered as wishing to take part in the event, 21 of whom have paid the £1,500 preliminary entry fee, as a token gesture that they are serious.

Of these 21 only three have officially announced - Grant Wharington's campaign out of Australia, Team Kan-do from America, led by former Chessie Racing backer George Collins, and husband and wife team, Neal and Lisa McDonald. While the Australian and American teams have seed money, the McDonalds to date do not.

While this might not sound particularly impressive as yet, it is a better state of affairs entry-wise than the race was in four years ago and there is a mood of optimism at Volvo Ocean Race HQ in Whiteley. There are some campaigns in the 21 (and some which are known to exist but are not in the 21 or the 70) such as a possible Brazilian entry led by Torben Grael and a Team New Zealand entry that will be sensational if they come off.

The primary job occupying Bourke and Hindley has been trying to establish the finer points of the new Volvo Ocean 70 rule. To do this they have been working with designers such as Farr Yacht Design, Merfyn Owen, Hugh Welbourn, Jim Pugh, Rob Humphries, the Woolfson Unit and Juan Kouyoumdjian, who have been involved to varying degrees: from having the draft rule sent to them and being asked 'what do you think?' to being commissioned to carry out specific tasks such as examining sail areas, rules for measuring sails and displacement and righting arm calculations. They have also been working with leading meteorologist Chris Bedford who has been busy running virtual VO70s around the world using weather data from previous races.

"It's going to be 70ft long, with a canting keel, relatively high sail area for its displacement, aft Venturi-filled ballast tanks on the centreline for downwind in heavy airs, carbon ABS specification scantlings and rudders and unlimited with what you can do on foils," Glenn Bourke recaps the concept for the new beast. As mentioned previously, the foils will only be allowed one degree of movement - they can rotate, lift or cants - hence with a swing keel, they are likely to end up with one rudder, a canting keel and one or two daggerboards.

"There will be a bulb restriction," says Hindley. "And a maximum angle for the keel canting but it will be nothing to do with boat heel. It will be about how much you can cant it from one side to the other. We took that steer from talking to a myriad of designers who work in the Open 60 class." The main typeforming part of the Open 60 rule is limiting the static heel angle to +/- 10degrees with all movable ballast deployed, thus huge hull form stability is required to 'beat' the rule, resulting in the typically beamy Open 60 hull shape.

The carbon fibre mast for the new boat will be of the same proportions as an America's Cup boat rig so that the existing plugs and moulds can be used, says Bourke.

Sail area will have dimensional restrictions on P, E and J and there will be a mast height restriction. The number of sails has been reduced from 38 to 20 in total - although this won't stop people testing extra ones - with roughly nine sails being measured in per leg. Over the course of illbruck's successful assault on the last race they had 17 mainsails built. Bourke and Hindley hope that the new restrictions and the semi-deliberate late announcement of the new rule will encourage such expenditure not to be repeated.

"The good sail designers we have been speaking to, think the sails logically fall into areas," says Bourke. "If you could do the VPP on this boat, you might find that this boat might not need the jib top reacher, because it is such a narrow band when you’ve only got nine sails and you can only have masthead chutes, ¾ chutes, jibs and a mainsail - and that’s it. Because the number is so low it forces typeforming sails - which is exactly what we want. We want people to think about the shape of sails, not about their dimensional characteristics or creating a quirky thing with a piece of mesh hanging off the back of it to comply with the rules. If we squash the numbers down then we don’t have to define everything else."

Hindley points out that sailmakers good at creating sails for going upwind or downwind. "They only need a little bit of development work. It’s reaching sails where you could spend a lot of time in development but there will be ways of limiting it. It is the new sails, like for instance like the old Code 0, coming along - that is where they spent phenomenal amounts of money and design and development time working on that."

Composite rigging such as Vectran and PBO (and possibly Southern Spars' new carbon rigging when it becomes available) will be allowed.

While the new Volvo Ocean 70 rule looks set to place fairly heavy and finite restrictions on the horsepower of the rig, there are unlikely to be many for the hull other than Bmax and length. "There's going to be no concaves or hollows aft of 30% or something like that," continues Glenn Bourke. "There will be some minimum freeboard restrictions - sensible amounts - and bowsprit length maximums."

Carrying a spinnaker pole will be optional. "The guys tell us that in the Southern Ocean when it’s blowing hard and you’ve got the fractional chute up - you need the pole to balance the boat," says Bourke. Hindley adds that in big waves, when the boat is accelerating, the pole is used to help keep the kite full. "You probably don’t have to bring it back more than 15-20 degrees. But you definitely need it."

Also optional is roller furling for the headsails. This has been disallowed in the past but is now legal and one wonders whether with the new crew restrictions (9 blokes, 11 women, 10 mixed) that it shouldn't be made mandatory, otherwise the job of sailing these boats will become even more of a Herculean task than it was with the previous VO60s. "Talk to the sailors and they are of two opinions," says Hindley of the roller furling issue. "The only time it doesn’t work is going upwind for efficiency reasons. But if you are reaching or running it doesn’t make a great deal of difference. A little more pitching inertia, but not a great deal."

Most impressive and perhaps something which hasn't fully come to light to date is just how much faster the new boat will be than the old one. The weight of a Volvo Ocean 70 looks set to be around 13.5 to 14 tonnes - a smidgeon more than the old boat - but will be 6ft longer (Volvo Ocean 60s were around 64ft long...) and will have considerably more sail area. The big spinnaker, Hindley gives as an example, will be 480sqm compared to 300sqm on the VO60.

"The reason why we’re so big on sail area is all the sailors say 'we’d prefer to reef in the heavy stuff and go fast in the light', which was interesting for me because we started off thinking we'd go conservative in the rig so that they don’t have to have massive fights when they get into the heavy stuff," explains Bourke. "But they said 'that is not the issue, reefing is easy, we’re used to it, so give us the sail area so that when we are sailing in 12-14 knots we are leaping along'."

As a result it is estimated that the new boat will be roughly 4 knots faster in heavy breeze but also 4 knots faster in light conditions than the VO60. "They are narrow on the waterline and you can unballast them so they are quite light and you have to reef anyway," says Bourke.

With this added horsepower in the lower wind range it would seem likely that leg times in the Atlantic will be shortened, but Andy Hindley says the models they have run, indicate that bigger gains are to be had in the Southern Ocean.

"What I’m told is quite frightening," says Hindley with a smile and that disturbing SAS stormtrooper-style glint in his eye. "Chris Bedford ran the numbers for the last five years and from New York to Southampton the new boat would have taken just under seven days whereas the old boat would have taken 11. So it is seriously fast."

So is 'more speed' the main reason for coming up with a new boat? This is only part of it, says Bourke. "The main reason is to make it an interesting boat. The old boats have lost their interest factor. Does it turn you on if someone designs another Volvo Ocean 60 which is a millimetre or two different? You can bearly write about it! Plus canting keel technology is the future of the sport - it has got to come. The boats aren’t heavier for massive gains in righting moment, so it is a bit like a 49er. That type of boat is proving to be the way forward for dinghies."

While encouraging design innovation, a likely upshot of the new, more 'Open' rule will be a greater disparity in speed between the boats. Bourke says that they have obviously tried to constrain the main performance paramenters of length, beam, displacement and sail area and he hopes that the new rule will ultimately typeform the boats so that they become closer in their performance.

"The thing is - we’re doing slightly longer legs, 8,000 nautical miles instead of 6,500 miles - and the boats are going quicker, so the disparity is going to be greater no matter how much how we try and constrain it," says Bourke. "It will be more like cat sailing in terms of separation and coming back, but perhaps that will make it tactically more interesting."

Hindley thinks that as with the first iteration of any new rule the boats arriving on the start line in two years time will be quite diverse and agrees that there will be separation between the boats on the race course. "Freeing up things like where you can put your keel, how many rudders you want, how many daggerboards do you want, where are you going to put them, where are you going to put the rig in relation to it all, what kind of hull shape - we’ll probably going to end up with boats that will be separated a lot. Whereas the VO60s all had very similar performance characteristics and as a result they all tended to go the same way."

Bourke hopes that the in-port racing will help ensure that every boat has its hour and will also be the place where you can get close-on boat for boat racing. "That’s where you will get the best broadcasts, the most exciting bottom mark roundings, crashes, fantastic and really bad tactical manoeuvres - all the things that we can’t see on the long ocean legs."

Some interested parties have mooted that the in-port racing will encourage teams to have a specialist 'inshore' crew for the in-port racing, but the new rule will prohibit this. "It is a hard rule to write," says Bourke. "But it is important not to have two sets of sailors."

All will be revealed regarding the new Volvo Ocean 70 rule when it is formally announced on 8 September - the 30th anniversary of the start of the first race.

Tomorrow Hindley and Bourke discuss other aspects of the 2005 Volvo Ocean Race