The Race Ready?

After Fossett's comments on delaying the start of The Race, Ed Gorman looks at whether Team Philips will be ready for the Southern Ocean

Pete Goss and Mark Orr, the key players in the troubled Team Philips catamaran project for The Race, say they are still on course to make the start of the event, scheduled for New Year's Eve, despite having lost months of work-up time due to the structural failure in the port bow.

Orr says the suggestion floated about six weeks ago by PlayStation owner Steve Fossett - that The Race be delayed - is a non-starter and both he and Goss and all the other prospective competitors are of one mind in agreeing that it should go ahead on schedule.

Orr confirmed that in the wake of Fossett's remarks, which were made to a journalist during the Round the Island Race in which PlayStation took part, competitors met to discuss this and other issues in Paris. Orr says there was unanimous agreement that the event should start in December.

"We had a meeting of the various challengers with the race committee, and everyone agreed that (delaying) would not be in the best interests of the race or the competitors. It would only make sense if there were not enough competitors whereas actually there are eight, so what's the point of delaying it when it's going to be a great event," says Orr.

There may be eight competitors on paper ready for the rigours of racing non-stop round-the-world and through the Southern Ocean, but in reality Fossett must be close to the mark in arguing that of the new generation of maxi-cats only two - PlayStation and Club Med - will be anything like race-ready.

Team Philips is not due out of the shed until the very end of September and the two Ollier-designed sister-ships to Club Med will not emerge for the first time until at least then and perhaps well into October. Among the prospective smaller entries, Tony Bullimore's old ENZA New Zealand has completed lengthening work, but the boat is awaiting both a rig and a sponsor - all of which is making its participation in the event doubtful.

Even Club Med and PlayStation are going to be pushed with the former needing to be repaired after the tip of one of its bows came off in the Atlantic, and the latter shortly to be lengthened by 20 ft to give the forward sections more buoyancy to help prevent the vast platform pitch-poling in heavy weather.

The programme for Team Philips after re-launch is hectic and very ambitious. The boat will immediately complete two trans-Atlantics before sailing to Monaco for The Race prologue, and then on to Barcelona for the start. This leaves very little time for the amateur crew to get to grips with their boat, or for repairs or adjustments to be made if anything else should go wrong with what is a simple but revolutionary machine.

Orr and Goss currently argue that even though Team Philips has been in the shed for months and has only sailed for a total of four days in its entire life, it is virtually race-ready already. "We don't have any worry about doing The Race because actually we have sorted out a lot of problems that we expect to encounter, particularly in the rig." says Orr.

He went on to explain that during the repair phase, one of Team Philips' two identical wingmasts has been mounted in a concrete base outside the shed in Totnes and the crew have been "sailing" it - doing many hours of testing and sail-handling practice. So useful has this been, that Goss now even refers to the disaster off the Scillies earlier this year as a "heaven-sent" opportunity.

It's a bizarre approach, as Orr explains, "The reason that we've had the masts in the ground is to effectively sail the boat. We are as prepared as we can be - we've been training and training and optimising the rigs. That is work that would normally be done on the water." He adds, "We would be dead against the Race being delayed as would the other competitors."

Looking in from the outside, there seems every chance that what has been billed as the greatest nautical show on earth could yet fall flat. Rather than being a mad dash round the world for the biggest boats ever built which will have us all sitting on the edges of our armchairs, it may well turn into a yawn as one after another of these ill-prepared and untested new boats crash out. You might bet on PlayStation and Club Med getting round - but would you bet on the others?