A Rig Too Far?

With Team New Zealand's mast crashing down, Andy Rice asks Jason Ker what now for the Millennium Rig?

Ker 11.3 Shakermaker

But calculating the resultant loads on the rig is somewhat of a black art, he admits. "We asked John Levell to run a study on a three-spreader Millennium rig [as used by Team New Zealand in the America’s Cup], but we couldn’t get it to stand up on the computer model.

"These rigs are very difficult to set up, there is some slightly weird stuff going on with the loads. With a conventional rig you can design it on paper and you can see pretty much where the loads are going to appear. With these new type of rigs, some loads seem to loop around and join on to other loads."

In the end, Ker opted for a two-spreader format for Roaring Meg, which she carries even now, despite that unhappy day during the Commodore's Cup when her run as top-scoring individual boat came to so abrupt an end.

"I can see why the America’s Cup teams are so keen on the idea," he says. "One of the advantages is that you have more support points. With a three-spreader Millennium rig you have six support points between the caps and the deck compared with four on a conventional rig. But now it will be interesting to see how many of them go that way in the America’s Cup next year."

Ker believes the rig is worth a few percentage points of extra speed, but at the cost of being that much more tweaky. "This is fine when you have professional teams sailing full time and pushing things to the edge as they need to in their game. But we’ve taken a few steps back because we are dealing with a different market, where clients expect something more practical and reliable.

"With the Ker 11.3 you can tack without thinking, whereas with something like Roaring Meg you’ve got to think a few seconds about what you’ve got to do before you go into a manoeuvre." That’s not always an option available to your average racer, especially in an area as treacherous and unpredictable as the Solent.

For the weekend sailor, this innovative mast design is not for the faint of heart or thin of wallet. And perhaps, on the evidence of the past month, even for the most experienced of America’s Cup sailors the Millennium concept could be a rig too far.