World match racing champion goes cat sailing

Team GAC Pindar's Ian Williams on his action packed year

An action-packed year ahead for British match racer Ian Williams: Team GAC Pindar have nominated him as skipper not just on the World Match Racing Tour but also of their new Extreme Sailing Series campaign. Also there was the prospect of Williams continuing with David Murphy’s new American team Ironbound on the RC44 circuit.

“It is going to be a busy year, but not quite as busy as published. I am not sailing the 44 anymore,” admits Williams.

Even with the Extreme Sailing Series and the Tour there will be clashes. The Istanbul event at the end of May coincides with Match Race Germany for example, but, as Williams points out, one benefit of the Tour is that you only have to count your best five events from eight, so you don’t have to do all the events to win. “Obviously doing them all gives you a better chance of winning, but with the way the scoring works, if you have five good ones with extra points in Malaysia, Ben [Ainslie] showed last year that you could do it without doing the whole thing.”

The biggest challenge facing Williams this year, will be making the transition from match racing in monohulls to fleet racing on tight courses aboard catamarans in the Extreme Sailing Series. Williams has sailed an Extreme 40 before, but not raced one, which is why this last week he has been in Oman learning the ropes.

“I think it is going to be quite a big challenge for us. The standard on the Extreme Sailing Series is going to be very high this year. As soon as the Cup teams come in obviously they bring in a lot of resource with them and so they will obviously be very hard to beat as will the more established teams on the circuit like Oman Sail and Rothschild.”

With another match racer Paul Campbell-James skippering the winning boat in 2010, then presumably this brings some hope to Williams who is was World Match Racing Tour champion in both 2007 and 2008. “I wouldn’t say I am the best person to ask yet, but from what I have seen a lot of it is in your starting strategy, because ultimately you are trying to do two tacks up the beat and when you do those tacks is almost set by where you are on the startline and how well you execute that start. So starting strategy and execution of that is pretty crucial and that is very similar to match racing.”

Racing on board with Williams will be a strong squad comprising America's Cup sailors from Oracle Racing who will fill the rest of the spots on a rotational basis. For Oman, the first event on the 2011 Extreme Sailing Series that takes place over 20-24 February, Williams will have Brad Webb, Jono MacBeth and Gilberto Nobili sailing with him, but others such as Joe Spooner, Shannon Falcone and Brian MacInnes are also due to feature through the season.

“I am really looking forward to it,” says Williams of his first serious foray on to racing on two hulls. “I think one of the reasons I ended up as a sailor is that I enjoy so much the learning side of any sport, but in most sports once you get to about 20-22, you start going downhill, and the best thing about sailing is that you can be improving on later into life. So I still enjoy the learning side and the constant improvement and this is going to be a very interesting new challenge.”

For Williams, the America’s Cup remains his long term goal - in this arena he has already skippered China Team’s boat in the Louis Vuitton Trophy in Auckland. With the Cup going multihull, then competing in the Extreme Sailing Series could sure be a useful stepping stone? “Some cat experience could be useful for that, although I am not sure how much – at this stage it is hard to say how much the Extreme 40 circuit will be a feeder into the Cup. With the WMRT it was always a debate: some people thought it was and some people thought it wasn’t a feeder. I suspect we’ll end up with a similar situation, some Cup teams might look to it to bring in new talent and some might not.”

While Team GAC Pindar competed in two of the Extreme Sailing Series events last year, this year they are committed to the full series and Williams believes the relationship with his shipping company sponsor could be a long one. “We are going to be find our way a little bit on the ESS circuit this year because we don’t have the budget of some of the other teams, but hopefully we can deliver well on GAC’s aims and get them excited about staying in the sport for a long time.”

Between events on the Extreme Sailing Series, Williams be travelling to World Match Racing Tour regattas, alongside with Torvar Mirsky, who has taken over from Paul Campbell-James as skipper of the 2010 winner The Wave, Muscat, and has a similarly ambitious program this year.

While Williams twice won the Tour, the last two seasons have seen him drop off the pace a little. This is partly funding-related, we put it to him? “I think that is fair. The funding thing is that obviously key. The difference with the WMRT and the Extreme 40 is that you can enter it [the Tour] with a low level of funding, but it obviously impacts on your ability firstly to train and secondly to keep a consistent team together. Whereas in 2008 I sailed with the same four people almost every event, in 2009 and 2010 I sailed with quite a large number of different crewmembers and we hadn’t done any concerted training and inevitably that impacts on your performance. If you look at all the top teams above us in both years they had very consistent crew throughout the year and that allows you to build on lessons from events to event and work up to the final event in Malaysia [the Monsoon Cup].”

While Williams hasn’t finalised him match racing crew for this season – the first event, Match Race France in Marseille is still someway off in mid-May – he says with funding in place upfront, he will be able to keep a more consistent squad together in 2011.

We are intrigued by the World Match Racing Tour's new ‘bid for your Tour card’ system and want to know how much Williams stumped up. “I couldn’t comment! The Tour runner bids system, where you make a bid for a Tour Card, they base it partly on your financial bid and partly on how much they want you on the Tour and how much media you will bring and whether you’ll enhance the reputation of the Tour – they had a list of criteria including sailing skill and current and previous rankings on both the Tour and ISAF, overall presentation and media/PR plan.”

However the bidding system doesn’t seem to have had much effect on the entry with the usual suspects returning with the exception of Ben Ainslie, who is focussing on his Finn. “My understanding is that the intention is not to get the richest people on the Tour, I think the Tour is keen to keep the top guys there and they want to keep it as a meritocracy, but at the same time try and raise some revenue and also to ensure that those sailors have a commitment to the Tour. In the past when you could get Tour cards for free or you were just invited to each event, they did have problems with people saying they would take on invites and then pulling out quite late on. By having effectively a financial stake in the Tour, a commitment from the sailors, then they are less likely to do that.”

Generally Williams says the World Match Racing Tour is quite stable, although they are planning on introducing new events in 2012-13 and have ramped up the PR and television side since it changed ownership last year.

With Russell Coutts and his team at Oracle Racing taking a back to basics look at the rules and race format for the 34th America’s Cup, primarily with the aim of making the sport as exciting as possible and easy to understand, one wonders if this will ultimately have a knock-on effect to other walks of match racing.

“Of course the sentiment is a good one. Is that not exactly what ISAF did about 15 years ago? I remember all the numbers changing and the fundamental way it was written changed and the idea then was to simplify them and they came up with a whole load of simple rules, then sailors being sailors found loopholes and then they came up with more rules to fill the loopholes and I think we ended up back where we started. Maybe that is unfair. If they are able to take the rules and simplify them then that would be a great thing, but I don’t think the person writing the rules in the first place deliberately tried to make them complicated."

While match racing and fleet racing are deemed different sports within sailing with their own unique rules, Williams doesn't subscribe to this. “I have never really subscribed to match racing and fleet racing as being that different in the first place. Ultimately you have just got to get your boat around the course faster than another boat.”

For some weeks now a new set of racing rules for the 34th America’s Cup has been doing the rounds among umpires (we have yet to see a copy) and Williams says that when they are finally published he imagines the organisers of the Tour will look over them to see if there are any good ideas they can incorporate. “I guess the difference with the Tour is that it is an ISAF World Championship so it sits on top of a pyramid of other match racing events – a large pyramid. There may be as many as 500-700 match racing events annually around the world, so I think it is more difficult for the Tour to make sweeping changes like that, but at the same time if the new rules are simpler and work well, then why not push that through for the whole sport. Why not use those rules for fleet racing as well or certainly umpired racing whether that is Olympic medal races or Extreme 40s or RC44s?”

Aside from his match racing and catamaran sailing, Williams will continue to coach Lucy Macgregor and says he has some other irons in the fire too.

“I am really looking forward to what I am doing. The Extreme Sailing Series being a completely new challenge for me is going to be really exciting and I also very excited about the doing the World Match Racing Tour with funding guaranteed upfront so I can get a crew together and go training to do all the things I have missed for the last two years. I feel we can go and prove that we haven’t lost it!”