Dalton opts for Frers boat

After much number crunching Dalton gets the Frers boat and Lisa McDonald the Farr

Grant Dalton, skipper of the Nautor Challenge's Amer Sport One, announced he will race the Frers design in the Volvo Ocean Race. This will means that Lisa McDonald and the girl's crew of Amer Sport Too, will be sailing the Volvo Ocean 60 from Farr Yacht Design.

Stringent tests have been carried out on both yachts over recent weeks to determine which yacht will be raced by which team. Dalton commented: "It's appropriate that we'll be racing the V.O.60 designed by Swan's designers. We'll be aiming to use this to emulate Swan 65 Sayula II's victory in the first ever Whitbread in 1973/74."

Dalton went on to say; "We have hard data on the performance of each boat in various conditions. We have taken that data and run it against weather data from previous races. It was close between the two boats. Some years the Frers would have won and in others it would have been the Farr."

He continued: "Then we ran our performance data against data on the weather likely to be encountered from September 23. This is where accurate data
comes into contact with knowledge of historic weather, intuition, gut feeling and to an extent, crystal ball gazing.

"In the end it was a subjective decision. We could have played it safe and taken the Farr boat because the Farr people are very experienced designers
to the Volvo Ocean 60 rule and we knew we would have a boat which is equal to the other Farr boats in the fleet. The other option was to go with the Frers
design because in the testing it has shown the potential to be a hard boat to beat."