Whatever happened to the djuice Dragons?

Peter Bentley asks what has happened to the boys in pink

As the Volvo Ocean Race fleet prepares for the next parking lot, Knut Frostad's djuice is falling yet further behind. Nearly 200 miles adrift of the leaders, djuice seem to be running out of options. Whatever has happened to the boys in pink?

Frostadt is happy to admit to having made tactical errors early in the leg, and a broken headboard car sustained as the boat pounded out of the Bay of Biscay can have done nothing for their speed. "Never in my life has my patience been tested harder" wrote Frostadt from the boat. "A small loss during the first days out of England has grown to a massive distance, even if we have been fighting like hell, day and night and most likely made very few mistakes the last days. We just missed the first train and our train just won't give us opportunities to go as fast at the moment. We simply have less wind than the leading pack."

But can these losses alone account for the relatively poor performance of the Norwegian entry? Some are even beginning to ask if the boat is just plain slow.

Many were surprised when Frostadt selected Laurie Davidson as the team's designer but Frostadt's logic seemed sound. Before the race, he was quoted as asking, "Why would Farr design me a better boat than any of the other teams". Right now one can't help thinking that the question on his mind must be 'why would Davidson design me a better boat than any of the other teams'.

Looking from the outside, with hindsight the decision to take two boats from a man who though well respected in America's Cup and inshore yacht design had no experience of the Volvo Ocean Race smacked of either arrogance or recklessness. Though the djuice team grew out of the Innovation Kvaerner syndicate in the last race it is not clear how much, or even if any, testing was done against the old design.

While it is easy to understand the argument that two boat testing and especially sail design is much more effective with two identical boats, the whole argument falls flat if both those boats are basically slow. With no benchmark to test against - not even a previous generation Farr boat - the djuice Dragons really had no idea if their boat was a pocket rocket or a wet-nosed dog.

With so much testing why has djuice proved more vulnerable to breakage then the other well prepared boats? In addition to the broken headboard, djuice's watermaker has been playing up distracting the crew with repair work. Unlike Team SEB who has had similar problems - and for a brief while even led the race - the djuice Dragons have not as yet been able to provide replacement parts.

What is for sure is that the Davidson design has a wildly different performance envelope from the Farr boats and to a certain extent, Grant Dalton's Amer Sports One. It is easy to see why Dalton with his lack of time for preparation would take a boat from outside the box; it is harder to see why a well resourced and fully prepared team would do the same - at least without some very solid basic data on which to base the decision.

It could be of course that djuice is simply stunningly fast in the fully powered-up conditions of the Southern Ocean and blasts off to romping victories in the two legs down south. But what of the other seven legs that will in all probability be sailed in a mix of conditions similar to those seen so far? With equal points on offer for every leg, this would hardly be a race-winning strategy.

Maybe, just maybe, djuice is not slow at all and Frostadt really is correct when he blames his tactical errors for the boats' poor performance so far. If this is the case, Frostadt and his crew will have piled a huge psychological burden upon themselves before they even reach Cape Town.

With this edition of the race likely to be a very close affair, mental toughness an the ability to fight back from setbacks will undoubtedly prove crucial to success. Against this background it is hard to judge how the djiuce crew are bearing up under the strain of propping up the results sheet for virtually the entire race so far. More pertinently they seem to have neither the speed nor the tactical options to extricate themselves from their predicament.

The tone of the e-mails coming from the boat has varied between bizarre defiance and deep depression. On the 2nd October Frostadt wrote "Don't you ever think that we have accepted the loss. No massive high pressure ridge will stop us. No broken headboard car will stop us. No broken water maker and shortage of fresh water supply will stop us. No endless flow of negative position reports will ever stop us. There will be good news coming, and good news is best in the end."

In a tone that comes close to desperation, Frostadt continued asking himself, "So what is it like to be the skipper right now, looking the guys in the eyes every hour. Seeing the optimistic smile just barely covering the begging thoughts and dreams of better days to come, on everyone's face." One can only guess at the answer.

For the sake of the race and especially for the crew on djuice one can only hope that their current position is but a temporary one. The Whitbread Round the World race has a history of crew and team shake-outs at the first stop. One can't help thinking Frostadt must be a worried man.