What kit?

We speak to sailor and coach Paul Brotherton about what people are using in the 470 class and why

The 470 has always been known as a highly technical class. With Olympic sailing becoming more professional and sailors striving for every single ounce of speed they can muster, we went in searchof what is currently the best equipment to use and more importantly what will be come the Olympics in 2008?

Two manufacturers currently dominate the market in 470 hulls. Mackays from New Zealand had outstanding success in the Athens Olympics with all three Men’s medals going to people sailing their boats. Zeiglemayer (GER), however have also seen great success over recent years having four out of the top five competitors at the 2004 Men’s Worlds sailing their boats. These two manufacturers have more or less dominated over the last three or four years, but it may not stay that way for long. Paul Brotherton, ex-470 Olympian and current 470 coach, believes that there is another manufacturer we should all keep our eyes on. “The dark horse and the boat that I think you should watch out for over the next 24 months could be the Nautivela (ITA.) I think those guys are going to make a bit of aresurgence,” he explains. The thought of another boat coming along that suddenly everyone wants to buy one might seem a little far fetched but as Brotherton points out it only takes one person to get a good result and everyone will rave about the boat.

“In many respects a 470 is a 470,” Brotherton continues. “They are a very difficult boat to build and make last. All the main manufacturers do it, and have done it well.” The main reason that the 470 is such a difficult boat to build is partly due to the restrictions put on production by the class rules. The boat has to be a single skinned construction. As Brotherton points out you lay them up in a mould and then you drop a rib in there and it just moves all over the place. He says that as a sailor this is really quite irritating: “If you used modern building techniques you could build a boat for less money that would last three times as long. The class just won’t do it - it is an old traditional class and they don’t want to grandfather all the old boats that are out there.”

One of the obvious issues raised by the lack of longevity in the hulls is that if you are to do an Olympic campaign Brotherton estimates that you will need three boats at an absolute minimum, possibly four. However agood thing to come out of this is that it allows a great deal of experimentation for competitors. Brotherton says that if he were embarking on an Olympic campaign then he would buy a fleet standard hull, either a Mackay or a Zeiglemayer. As he would have to buy a second hull anyway then he would also buy a Nautivela so he could test the two boats himself.



Mast

One very important bit of kit for a 470 sailor is of course their mast. The class has seen a great deal of change in this area over the last ten years but broadly speaking Super Spars have been the main manufacturer for the last eight years or so. “If you were to throw a broad net over what people were using, the Super Spar M7+ is easily the most popular.” Brotherton explains. “Selden, though have been pushing pretty hard and doing a lot of development and it is pretty widely accepted that their finishing touches on their product are very good quality. You could argue that now Selden are probably superior to anything else that is out there.” The Selden mast has yet to be tried by any major names at a regatta so it is still a little bit of an unknown entity but Brotherton seems convinced that it will only be a matter time. “It will be interesting to see whether and who will be the first to have a go with the Selden and see what they can do with it,” he says.

Like with the hulls Brotherton believes that there might be a bit of a major shake up in the future for the class. He says that now people are able to pump and do a lot of body movements up the wind range it is likely that we will see the return of some very stiff masts like the Epsilon - the mast that almost everyone used throughout the 1980s and 90s. “People stopped using it because it was very difficult to use once you started to get overpowered. Now people are so much better at kinetics and now the rules say that you can use any kind of kinetic that you want to de-power the rig, it is different. Before you used to get a gust that was too powerful and the boat would stagger.Now the crews are literally almost capable of folding the mast in two they are so good at being able to work the rig and pump their bodies. So there might be a case of putting in a much stiffer mast on so that you can get more power and a little bit more control in the light to medium conditions but you are still able to handle that power in the stronger wind.”

It may seem very odd for people to be considering reverting to a mast that is ten years behind development but the reasons that people changed were more to do with racing formats than technical development.Brotherton explains:” I think that people moved to the less stiff mast for two reasons. Firstly as a reaction to more and more self de-power boats appearing, but also moving to shorter courses was a big key. There is now much less time between races. Typically you will do three races in a day, you finish a race and then you have to grab your lunch repack the kite and sail back up to the start line and the warning signal is going. So I think people were tempted to go to the more automatic rigs mostly because ofmodern racing formats.” Now competitors are allowed to use kinetics more it gives much greater control over these stiffer rigs. The ability to use body movements regularly means that competitors can work the boat much more physically and this effectively doubles the wind band for each setting because you are becoming overpowered later.



Sails

Interestingly when choosing sails in the 470 fleet it is not just a case of which manufacturer you choose, it is also a case of which specific loft that you choose. For example Japanese Norths have enjoyed a lot of success over the last couple of years and are considered by many to be faster than UK Norths. This comes about because each individual loft is different and has its own specific cut. The trick really is to think about them as an entirely separate company. The three brands that are dominating at the moment are the Japanese Norths, Olimpic Sails and Toni Tio sails.

Over the last few years people seem to have gone for radial cut over the more traditional horizontal cut sails. There are three main advantages to using the former. Firstly since it is a 3-dimensional design by computer where the shape is transferred to the radial panels with very fine tolerances, there is no distortion and a very smooth curve is developed. Secondly factors such as sailing weight of a team, stiffness of a mast, and side bend, can be taken into consideration, and aperfect sail shape can obtained - theoretically - for the rig and crew weight used. Finally since the optimal cloth is most effectively arranged according to the direction of the stress in a sail, the result is the shape being maintained over a wider wind range and for a longer period which of course means a longer racing life.

Due to the way that they are cut, radial sails require a slightly different sail set-up and not all competitors have necessarily got to grips with them yet as Brotherton explains: “Strangely the people that I have seen use them at their best are Nic Asher and Elliot Willis. They only got it right in Palma last year and since then they do not seem to have got back up to that level of performance again. The way that their rig was set up was very interesting. They had quite a flat mainsail, which was noticeably flat off the luff but they had a very round section just in the leech of the main and that allowed them to lean on it and create the power. So they were not getting their power from depth, they were getting their power from a very tight and hard leech on the mainsail. In the conditions that they were having at Palma - which was between six and 12 knots - they were absolutely on fire. They were going through the water two percent faster than the boats around them they were just carving up the fleet and good people were there. It will be interesting to see if people go back to more conventional cross cut sails and stiffer rigs or whether they are going to stay with more bendy rigs and radial cut sails. There are really a number of interesting opportunities for people to take on.”

Because it is an Olympic class development of the 470 is always going to be dictated by which stage of the Olympic cycle we are in. This is both a positive and a negative. The negative is that pretty much two years out of every four there is not a great deal of major development going on. Of course the obvious upshot is that a least one year in every four sees people trying lots of different items of new equipment, different rig styles, different hulls etc. “Now is the time for development. If you do not try these things this year then you won’t be doing them in 2007,” comments Brotherton.“The nature of Olympic sailing these days is that half way through the Olympic cycle is the closing stages. It used to be that people would consider doing a campaign 15 months before the Olympics. The professionalism of both the sailors and the qualification series these days means thatonce you are half way through you are already starting to qualify for the pre-Olympics so the time for exciting and interesting and broad based developments is this year.”

It certainly looks as if the coming year will be an exciting one in the 470 fleet but it does not necessarily mean that we will see the results of a lot of these developments until the Olympics in 2008. China from what we hear is going to be a light and at best medium wind strength regatta with lots of chop. Brotherton believes that it will be interesting to see how people develop their style and set up for those conditions. Inevitably there are going to be people that are able to look at that and design rigs and set ups around China and may well then go out and not perform at their best at World and European Championships but then have set ups that are at their best in Qingdao. So one of the most important things about the next Olympics will be who has spent the most amount of time training in China. One thing is for certain: almost no matter what equipment they are using the best sailors are the ones that win events. Technical development is only there as a support to sailors and there is certainly no way you can buy yourself to greatness.