Little America's Cup heading for the UK

INternational C-Class troops starting to mass - Norman Wijker tells us of Invictus Challenge's campaign for 2013

With the America’s Cup going wingsail catamaran, so the number of ‘wingnuts’ has dramatically increased over the last months. At the more modest end of the sailing pantheon, this seems to be on the verge of taking place too in the C-Class with the return of the Little America’s Cup to European shores for the first time since 1970, with the next event due to be held in the UK in 2013.

Britain's Invictus Challenge are on the hunt as ever for sponsorship, but have a possible hook up with Dutch A-Class catamaran manufacturers, DNA, who may also be looking to field a team, while BAN the Spanish A-cat builder is also said to be sniffing around.

In France Benjamin Muyl has bought the ancient Patient Lady VI, which he sailed last year in Newport, while Alain Thebault of L’Hydroptère fame is believed to be teaming up with Jeremie Lagarrigue, who was with Muyl, Antoine Koch and the Patient Lady team in Newport last year. Welcome news is that there is another group from Australia, holders of the Little America's CUp from 1985 to 1996, which are trying to get a team together.

Sadly the move to a similar, scaled-up version in the America’s Cup doesn’t seem to be having much beneficial effect on the C-Class other than, we understand, one of the members of Vincenzo Onorato’s impressively silent Mascalzone Latino team showing interest.

Obviously there is some distance between 'interest' and pitching up with a kickin' 25ft long solid wingsail catamaran in the UK in just over two year’s time, but generally it indicates a ground swell in sailing’s most aerodynamically efficient class.

The British Invictus Challenge, having competed in two of the last three Little America’s Cups, is attempting to mount a more heavyweight campaign this time in order to put on a good show as the home team in 2013 – given the venue will most probably be Weymouth or Falmouth in August that year.

Ideally, says Invictus’ Norman Wijker, they would like to run a program with two new boats of similar performance that represent an incremental improvement over last year’s winner – Canadian Fred Eaton’s all-conquering Canaan – and they would then like to develop a new wing. “We have some more radical ideas which we’d like to try but obviously going down the radical-only route is high risk, so what we want to do is a risk-mitigation strategy.”

The link-up with DNA would see the Dutch A-Cat builder focus principally on the platform and in an ideal world four new C-Class platforms would be built, Invictus taking two and a team from DNA having the other two. “So we collaborate up to the point where we go sailing and then it’s every man for himself - two boats painted orange and two boats painted red, white and blue. That way we increase the fleet, we get more players coming into it, like the guys from DNA. They are interested. It is just finding the time and the money,” says Wijker. He reckons that to run their campaign they would be looking for a budget of £150,000 (which seems modest considering the amount of work involved – although no one on the Invictus team gets paid). “We think we can do two boats for that. The price comes down the more boats you build. We would still buy or at least assemble the wings and get some of the major components like the mast and the shelves manufactured. Then we could put it together and put in all the control systems, etc.”

So what will the new boats look like? Wijker confirms that they would be an incremental step on from Canaan, the principle factor being going taller with the wing and raising its centre of effort. We question whether this is necessary in what is likely to be a stronger wind venue than Newport, RI but Wijker points out that Canaan, with her taller wing than the rest of the fleet, was faster than the competition in all conditions.

“We might look at different plan form shape as well,” continues Wijker. “We will look at increasing the level of control, so we will put some controls above the shrouds which we don’t have at the moment. They [Canaan] have that on the flap, we might just do the flap as well or we might put some controls in the main element. We also have some aerodynamic tweaks and some secret stuff that we’d like to have a look at.”

Going taller inevitably means more structure and of course more weight, which is another vital ingredient in a C-cat’s performance. “It is always the compromise,” agrees Wijker. “Every new idea has to find its way on at minimum cost and weight. We are also looking at leading edge slats to see if those pay for themselves. The faster these boats go it means that when you are going downwind you are ever more closehauled and that means that drag becomes as much an issue as lift. Steve Clark was saying that he doesn’t crank his flaps on at maximum anymore. He is going for some intermediate setting on his flaps, because he’s still going 20 knots downwind trapezing.”

As Clark mentioned in our interview with him, Wijker agrees that in the next generation of C-Class wings there may not be the need to go for the current class 'norm' of double slotted, three element wings, but instead to opt for a more AC45/72 style of single slot wing, the advantage being less weight and, significantly, less drag.

“There are some studies we need to do to confirm that,” says Wijker. “Most of the time the double slotted flap is quite draggy. The double slot is there to try and stave off the stall so you can sail deeper and that is what forms the bottom end of the VPP. So what we are trying to do is increase the lift co-efficient by all the aerodynamic means that we have. Some are more aerodynamically efficient in that they have less of a drag penalty than others. What we are trying to do is evaluate all of those.”

A crucial new addition to the team, that Invictus now has, is a CFD specialist, who will be investigating this.

So while all the latest generation of C-Class wings are all of a similar slotted, multiple element configuration, does Wijker ever see someone attempting an entirely different technology as they tried with their Spitfire-style wing back in 2004.

“All the wings that were in Rhode Island were generically similar. They had an element one, two which was the trailing edge of element 1. Ours was slightly different but not radically so – we had a deformed trailing edge, whereas the other boats had a wedge which cambered one way or the other - and then a fixed flap behind that. I think there is some scope for looking at different ways of the twisting the wing. We have some ideas about how we might do that. The Australians tried something in 2004 which didn’t work and we understand why that didn’t work. Our ideas aren’t centred on that but, what might look at is perhaps a more deformable wing. That is an engineering/kinematic challenge and how do you make it work and make sure it deforms to the right shape. That is really why we want this two boat strategy.”

Wijker says he doesn’t think that there will be too much development in C-Class’ 25ft long hulls, however there is almost certain to be more design teams adopting lifting daggerboards, as have become de rigeur in the A-Class and, notably, are used on DNA’s boats. Wijker is also keen on the T-foil rudders as Canaan tried in Newport.

In this video, taken at the RYA Volvo Dinghy Show, Wijker gives us a guided tour of Invictus. As ever this takes a while to open up - be patient...