How to win the Volvo Ocean Race

Illbruck Watch Captain Stu Bannatyne shares his Southern Ocean experience and discusses how his team have got it right - so far!

A wet ride, as illbruck blasts through the Southern Ocean

People often ask me how this race differs to my last time around sailing with Lawrie Smith last time on Silk Cut. The biggest and most telling difference is the skippers. John was still relatively new to round the world racing and he assembled a very experienced team and most of the key decisions such as boat design, sail programme and crew selection were a result of team discussions.

With the illbruck campaign starting relatively early we have had the luxury of time to explore more options and consult with more people about these important decisions. The Silk Cut programme was very late and Lawrie was forced to make most of the important decisions himself without the time to consult with the team to any great length. As a result the boat was in a corner of the design envelope, very fast in strong winds but with an Achilles heel in the lighter wind range. Great for breaking records but not so good as an all round performer capable of winning the race.

I think one of the main reasons behind illbruck's success so far is consistency. Consistency is the goal of all the teams competing in this race and I think it would be fair to say that at the end in Kiel the most consistently well performing team will top the leader board. Our long build up and thorough preparation has left a few holes in our armour but hopefully less than some of the other teams.

Another key factor to success is people and I think this is an area sometimes not given the importance it deserves. With illbruck our sailing team and shore team has been assembled slowly but very carefully over the course of our campaign. The result is a highly qualified and experienced sailing team with a good blend of enthusiasm, offshore experience and inshore talent.

We have managed to assemble a crew who have experience on five of the boats from the previous Whitbread Race. This has been invaluable in optimising our boat and sail programme. Some of the other teams in this race are largely a continuation of programmes from the previous race and I see mistakes being repeated also.

A common thread here is preparation time, you can never have enough, there will always be more testing, more analysis, more crew training which could be done. With illbruck we had a structured programme to use our time to achieve different goals. The initial stage in Spain was devoted to crew selection, crew training and very importantly, establishing a comprehensive database of information using the two identical boats from the last race EF Education and EF Language.