The black art

James Boyd spoke to Derek Clark about how his team went about creating Wight Lightning

Derek Clark is a man exuding quiet confidence at the moment. His baby Wight Lightning, GBR70, has been launched and despite GBR Challenge being seen by the outside world as America's Cup newbies, he and his design team are confident that they have come up with a fast boat.

Peter Harrison's GBR Challenge is significant not only for being the first British AC campaign since Fremantle, but it is also the first since the competition changed to the America's Cup Class (formerly the International America's Cup Class) yachts. So Wight Lightning is the first ACC yacht ever to have been conceived and constructed in the UK.

The size of this task cannot be underestimated. Under the America's Cup protocol fledgling AC teams such as GBR Challenge cannot simply go to a yacht designer and say "we'll have one of what you did last time - but better..." The plans for the various Team New Zealand boats for example are the property of Team New Zealand and not their designers although quite how a designer is supposed to erase their memory once they move on from a campaign is hard to see. It is over just these issues that OneWorld is currently facing the America's Cup Arbitration Panel.

For Clark creating Wight Lightning was a case of starting from scratch. His first step was to set up a design team and British sailors can take pride in the fact that this included some of our top brains in this field. Full time on the project was an inner core, the Technical Group, of Clark, Jo Richards and the two designers bought in from Nippon - hull design specialist Akihiro Kanai and structural engineer Taro Takahashi. But Phil Morrison, Rob Humphreys, Hugh Whelbourn, Steven Jones and Simon Rogers were also part of the team.

"My role has been to co-ordinate the team and create an environment for us to feel comfortable working together," says Clark. Outside in the real world many of these gentlemen have their own design offices and are in competition with their own clients and ideas, so it was necessary for Clarke to create an environment where they could work together and freely give their input. "When I worked at Kookaburra we had a similar ethos. It was a nice ground of people, easy to get on with, enjoying what they were doing. You don't want to have divisions".

Compared to some of the giant design teams of the super-AC campaigns, Clark's core of 10 seems quite modest. "I'm very comfortable with the size of it," he says. "There is a right size, while if you get too big, you can't have the degree of closeness and interface and synergy that you can in a small group dynamic. You can get them in one room, you can discuss things, people feel included. I like knowing everyone. I like that we can just chat. That would disppear if we had 30 people more".

After some brain storming meetings the design team were each given an area of responsibility. Clark won't divulge who designed what but says that someone was working on appendages, someone on hulls, etc.

The team then set about working out what makes for a quick boat within the context of the ACC rule. In this they were fortunate that Clark himself was one of the original architects of the rule.

One of the first steps Clark says was to learn all they could about the last winning boat in this case Team New Zealand's NZL60 which demolished Prada's Luna Rossa by 5-0 in February 2000. This involved accumulating all the information in the public domain, in particular photos. In an unusual process that was the exact reverse of designing a yacht, these images were then scanned and pulling into a CAD programme where the lines of NZL60 were recreated. From here a tank test model of the 2000 winner could be built.

Clark says at this stage they also tried to second guess, looking at the ideas seen in NZL60, what avenues of development Team New Zealand's designers might be considering this time round.

Another principle avenue they used for research were the Nippon Challenge boats of what Peter Harrison describes as his "America's Cup start up kit." Under the America's Cup Protocol GBR Challenge were able to buy the Japanese team's physical assets including its two 2000 generation boats Idaten and Asurabut not its 'technology' such as the R&D work or the CAD files nor the construction and engineering details which went into their design (this is thought to be one of the reasons why several campaigns have lost the keels on their training boats).

Clark says they had to measure the hulls of the Japanese boat and again all this was entered into CAD programme where the boats were recreated. Having the CAD drawings and the ability to compare the computer performance simulations with the full scale boats also gave the team the possibility to refine and accurately calibrate their design software. Clark says that alongside their recreation of NZL60, the two Nippon boats were the first models they constructed for tank testing.

Part of the equation was designing a boat to suit the conditions expected for the summer months in Auckland's Hauraki Gulf and this was a very different proposition to building one for San Diego where the conditions rarely topped 10 knots. "In Auckland you tend to have a more all round boat," explains Clark. "You can get four seasons in one day there - start with no wind, then loads of breeze. The America's Cup tends to ignore everything less than 5 or more than 25 knots." The hulls were therefore tank tested for sailing windward-leewards in these conditions.

In total it is believed that Clark's team built 15-20 1/4 scale models and worked with the Wolfson Unit to tank test them at DERA's facility in Haslar, Gosport, which ironically is also the test facility Team New Zealand use. "For along time it was hard to beat NZL60," Clark says. "But in the end we did beat it".

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The design team with one of the test models