Assa light boat, sirree!

Jason Carrington gives James Boyd a guided tour of the Volvo Ocean 60 ASSA ABLOY

Whereas ASSA ABLOY is light because of the construction and the use of clever systems, the Frers boat is light - 230kg lighter than the standard Farr boat, Grant Dalton maintains - because its engineering is different (it was carried out by Giovanni Belgrano at SP Technologies). "Gio and SP are better at composite engineering that the Farr office. Gio has a much better feel for the materials you can use," comments Carrington. Saying this, he adds that the Frers boat has yet to cut the mustard in any sort of big breeze while all the boats from the Farr office have got a good record for staying in one piece. Even less is known about the djuice dragons' Davidson boat.

Carrington, Graham and their team were particularly ingenious in their development of the gear and systems on board. It is apparent from looking at several of the Farr boats that while their teams feel the Annapolis-based design house's hulls are unbeatable, there is room for improvement in their engineering and deck layouts. On Gunnar Krantz's SEB for example there are twin companionways. "Farr was the right guy to design the boat," says Carrington. "We didn't touch the key structure, like the keel structure." However they did write a weight saving hit list and go at it ruthlessly.

On deck you can see weight saving features everywhere. Only they and the Frers boat have composite chainplates bonded into the deck instead of the more conventional metal equivalent seen on the other boats - a saving of 5kg. The forward bulkhead for the forestay is also the result of their own engineering resulting in a saving of 4.5kg. Carrington says that many of the features which they came up with have also been used by Dalton on the Amer Sport boats and there has been a certain amount of co-operation between the two teams. Part of the reason for this was of the defection of Rob Papworth to Nautor Challenge from ASSA ABLOY. To build the girl's Amer Sport Too for example, Nautor Challenges bought some of ASSA ABLOY's deck moulds. In fact Dalton at one point was looking to buy the second ASSA ABLOY boat, but they were having none of it.

ASSA ABLOY is also unique in this fleet in having no hydraulic systems at all. Other boats use hydraulics for the vang, outhaul, the down f*****r on the bow and checkstays, but again for reasons of weight on ASSA ABLOY they make do with multiple part purchases. For example there is a 5:1 tackle on the 'DF', while the checkstays are tensioned by a 'deflector'. This is a line which attaches to the checkstay two thirds of the way up and pulls it at 90degs running down to the mast and back to the cockpit. "The downside is you end up with a lot of string," says Carrington. "But a nice thing about rope is you know when it's not working. With hydraulics you can just keep on pumping..."