From America's Cup to National 12

Jo Richards on what he would design for an America's DoG match and on winning Burton Week again after 32 years...

One of the unsung heroes of British yachting is unquestionably Jo Richards. Mild mannered, unassuming even shy on the one hand, but equally brilliant both as a sailor and designer on the other, the 1984 Flying Dutchman bronze medallist has turned his hand to the America’s Cup - he was on GBR Challenge’s design team - but is equally successful as a dinghy designer - he penned the popular Laser Pico and Vortex. However his bread and butter is in running Stephen Fein’s series of Full Pelts, which date back to the mid-1980s, for example when they won the Sardinia Cup in 1986, making this one of the longest standing owner-sailor relationships within our sport.

Fein’s Full Pelting is now divided between the pumped up 49er-like 36 footer that is mostly kept around the Swiss-Italian lake area for racing at events like the Bol d’Or Mirabaud and Centomiglia on Lake Garda while a 1720 is kept in the UK for events like the Round the Island and Cowes Week.



However Richards over the last two decades has also become something of a multihull specialist. He and Ed Dubois originally penned Stephen Fein’s Full Pelt Formula 40 back in the 1980s and since then for Fein he has designed a smaller Formula 30 catamaran, that was set to be a growing class in the 1990s, until the new Pelt blew the competition away. Significantly Richards was also part of the design team and skipper of Peter de Savary’s short-lived Blue Arrow campaign for the 1988 America’s Cup, that was in almost the exact same situation as Lorenzo Rizzardi’s Italian GreenComm challenge is at present. Only that while GreenComm doesn’t stand the remotest chance of being allowed to race next year in the case of Blue Arrow they went as far as designing, building and launching their radical foiler before Challenger of Record, Michael Fay, reckoned it might not be such a good idea that he allow his big KZ1 monohull to be pitched against them.

Having raced on the Swiss/Italian lakes for two decades now, Richards has earned something of a track record there now designing two of the lakes fastest ever multihulls, including the 40ft cat Khamsin that during the 1990s won the Bol d’Or Mirabaud in the hands of Societe Nautique Commodore Pierre-Yves Firmenish and culminated in his co-designing with Sebastien Schmidt, Ernesto Bertarelli’s first Alinghi cat, the ultimate boat ever to race on the lake.

We have written about this weapon before, but her vital statistics are worth re-iterating because they are about as extreme as you can get. Le Black, as she is now known, was designed to the ultimate lake boat rules of the day - 12.5m length, but with 4m of bowsprit out of the front and 3m of bumpkin (stern sprit) out of the back and 24.5m of rig height.

Richards reels off the numbers: “Basically it had 275sqm of upwind sail, which is about the same as Oracle started the Ameirca’s Cup with the time before last. With water ballast it has 60% of the righting moment of a Cup boat, on a boat that weighs 1300kg, which is obviously a lot less than 25 tonnes!" In fact it is about 150kg less than an Etchells...

"With those things you were flying a hull in 4 knots of breeze and fully powered up with water ballast downwind in 8 knots of breeze. Certainly in the lighter end of the wind range I used to reckon that you looked at the wind speed and multiplied it by 2.5 to get your track speed. So if there was 4 knots of breeze you could do 10 knots downwind and if there was 10 knots you could do 25 knots downwind…”



After winning the Bol d’Or three times, the boat was mothballed with the introduction of the D35 class five years ago. However Le Black was recently recommissioned for use by the Alinghi sailing team as a training vessel for the 33rd America’s Cup.

Given this background one would think that Richards would now be holding a position of reverence within Alinghi’s design team, but no doubt due to his low profile this isn’t the case. Nonetheless at the Bol d’Or Mirabaud recently, where Full Pelt retired prematurely given the lack of breeze, we felt it would be appropriate to quiz our man on what he would design for a DoG match today.

While over the last months we have be putting the case repeatedly that in a cat v tri battle where only length is fixed, a trimaran will always win, based on past history in particularly the ORMA 60 class, Richards maintains this isn’t the case.

“My logic is that if there is no minimum weight the catamaran is the logical way to go because you’ve just got less hulls! A trimaran on one hull is exactly the same load problem as the catamaran. You have to look fairly carefully as to whether it pays to put a piece down the middle like the D35s or whether you truss it. Certainly we found that with the catamaran you were never at a disadvantage to the trimarans in reality.”

Then why was that never been the case in the ORMA 60 class? “They are much higher safety factor. They tend to capsize in a less violent manner, when you start stuffing the nose in you have three noses to stuff in rather than two and because they are not racing them on one hull the whole time - they do it for the photos - they are losing some of the advantage they might have.”

So a 90ft long ultra-wide cat then? “You need power one way of the other. I think water ballasting it as well. Because if you tack with the water in both sides you have much more inertial mass, so you get through the tack so much quicker and you can get water on and off so quickly. And there were other things like we discovered that you would think it would be best to have the water ballast in the bottom of the boat. We actually found it is better to put a deck halfway across it and have it in the top half because you can scoop water up there so quickly and then if the wind drops you can get it out so quickly. You open the door and it goes away. It took us a little while to work that out. That was a second season iteration…”

When it comes to corner turning ability, then in our experience trimarans seem less inclined to get caught in irons tacking than their two hulled equivalent. But Richards says that this purely down to hull form. “It is about the shape of the boat, having more rocker in the right place and the distribution of buoyancy. You can make it work as well. Looking at the 40 footers here it was never an issue. Technically it is slightly harder. But I suspect in a match race there won’t be too many tacking duels.”

Anyway, by this time next week we will all know what the Alinghi design team have conjured up down in Villeneuve and it will be interesting to see if there is any Richards-influence in the new weapon even if he is absent from their design team.



National 12s

Meanwhile Richards has been in the news recently for very different reasons. After a 30 year break from the National 12 class, over last summer he built himself a new boat called Dead Cat Bounce (his previous winner was called Bounce) and with Sophie Mackley last month cleaned up at the class’ main annual event - Burton Week.

“I went to the class’ 70th anniversary dinner and various people said ‘you ought to get your old boat back,’” Richards recalls. “And eventually I’d drunk enough and I agreed to do something with it! And then I went and found that rotten old boat near Birmingham and rebuilding that and inevitably you start thinking about how you’d improve it…”

The National 12 is a development class where, like the International 14s, they are now sailing with T-foils on their rudders. However these for the most part are retrofits and with his new boat Richards designed it with a hull shape designed specifically to work with the foil.

“I have made no concessions at all about having anything at all resembling a planing run like you’d normally have,” says Richards. “It is very narrow on the waterline at the back with quite a lot of rocker, more pulled in in both directions. That puts a big lump in the water behind you but the wing sits right inside of that and gets ride of it again.”

As on the 14s and Moths, the pitch on the rudder T-foil can be altered but this is carried out via a piston mounted on the floor of the cockpit at the transom with the pivot point at the top of the rudder.

“There were eight or ten with foils there,” says Richards of Burton Week. “Last year was won by a boat with foils but they were half the length of mine and on a fairly conventionally-shaped boat. It allowed me to do all sorts of things with the hull shape that you wouldn’t otherwise be able to do. I am just using mine slightly more aggressively and I designed my boat from square one with it. You get away with a lot more rocker in the back of the boat because you can suppress the stern wave at the top and you can move the centre of buoyancy and move the rig further back and everything stacked towards the back.”

In addition to this the centreboard is fitted with a trim tab like an AC boat, which Richards says he has never tried before on a dinghy design. This represents about 29% of the chord of the centreboard and has a 6-7deg angle of movement. He has also come up with a cunning way to work it. “It is operated by the jib sheet, so when you pull the jib on it pulls the tab on automatically so you don’t have to think about it and we just lock it off downhill.” As on Cup boats, upwind this give him the flexibility of sailing high and slow or lower and faster or any combination between.

However his focus was not only on the appendages. “I pushed the whole sail design side a bit further. I made my own jibs which were probably 4 or 5 sqft bigger for the measured area - I went for it on the headboard width but changed the design at the top so that it actually set properly but having done that I discovered it was so far away from the load line – I only discovered it by mistake that I’d cut the leech off straight on the first one where you’d normally put hollow in! But it didn’t flutter at all and I thought ‘that was interesting’, so I made a sail with 4in of round in the back and that was fine as well. So not only did I have a head that was 320mm wide, it stuck out another 4in beyond that. And the clew was the same, that stuck out. If you put enough stiffening in the foot and you get the geometry right, you pull the base of the sail on to the deck which then cantilevers around the sheet and holds the leech tight, you end up with a strip this wide up the back that is bonus.” Cunning.

Given this innovation, Burton Week was what might be described as a comfortable win for Richards with a second in the first race and then a string of six bullets. “It was reasonably alright for an old git!” he concedes. “And it was over a complete range of conditions from 3-5 knots on the first day to a nice force 3-4 on the second day and Burton started in 25-28 knots of breeze and finished in 4 and on the last day we had 25-30 knots all day.”

So what has he learned about sailing the boat? “Quite a lot! It feels extraordinary like a skiff to sail but it is completely the opposite shape to how you would draw a skiff. So I have learned an awful lot from it. There were one or two areas I was worried about which weren’t an issue at all at the end of it.”

One might imagine that Richards would now have a string of orders for new National 12 built to his design but he says he has not interest in building them and is quite happy for others to follow what he has done. “I did it for me. Reliving my youth! I last won it 32 years ago, which must be some sort of record in a dinghy class…”

More photos of the National 12 on the following pages...