Volvo Ocean Race overhaul

Chief Executive Helge Alten says radical changes for the next event will be decided by the end of the year

Revolution is in the air at Volvo. As preparations intensify for this year's Volvo Ocean Race which sets sail from the Solent in September, the company has revealed to madforsailing that it is considering very wide-ranging changes to the race for the subsequent staging in 2005/2006.

There is a considerable feeling among sailors and many others involved in sailing that the Whitbread/Volvo concept is overdue a major overhaul and this has not been lost on the chief executive of the Volvo Ocean Race, Helge Alten.

In an interview for madforsailing he has disclosed that the company intends to embark on a thorough review of the race during the first half of the upcoming event and that it expects to have a firm view on what changes it will make by the Auckland stopover in January.

Alten said just about every aspect of the race will be up for grabs including the type of boats it is sailed in, the length and number of stopovers, and even the name of the event. About the only thing which seems certain is that the next-but-one Volvo race will have some stopovers.

Most intriguing are Alten's thoughts on the boats. Like everyone else, he has hardly been able to ignore the fact that a 24-year-old Englishwoman named Ellen MacArthur who stands just 5ft 2in tall managed to race round the planet this winter in just 94 days in a 60ft boat on her own and, on some days, came close to rivalling the best mileage achieved by a Volvo 60 with 12 crew on board. In comparison, the Volvo is going to take nine months to get back to where it started.

Alten accepts that although the Whitbread/Volvo 60s are fast in their own right and well-proven, the concept seems dated in comparison to the Open 60s. "It's not a question of if we went that way - more towards the Open 60 and towards a radical design - it's a question of how quickly we want to move that way," he said. "But we don't have to be the quickest boat around the world and we also must consider the safety aspect."

One advantage of the Open 60-type is that crews can be smaller which makes campaigns cheaper. Alten believes there should also be full discussion of a One Design class(the current Volvo 60 is a box rule) and he even suggested the possibility of introducing One Design sails, something which has never been tried in a professional ocean race.

Continued on page 2...