Jo Richards

Ed Gorman speaks to the man whose hull was chosen to become GBR Challenge's new ACC boat

British sailing is lucky that it has Jo Richards. An exceptionally bright free-thinking creative mind and a first class yachtsman in his own right, Richards is an object lesson in modesty and someone who is only ever reluctantly going to own up to his many successes and achievements both as a designer and a sailor.

There is a rumour doing the rounds that Richards drew the lines of the GBR Challenge for the America's Cup hull that is now well into its first month of building at the syndicate headquarters in Cowes. This, remember, is going to be the single most important racing yacht built in Britain, certainly in the last 15 years, on which the hopes of a team of new generation Brit sailors led by Ian Walker will rest.

The rumour is that Richards drew the lines of the hull on paper and it then largely survived subsequent modification as the boat was brought to life on the computer - not by Richards who does not work on computers - and then through tank-testing of a model at the Wolfson Unit in Southampton. Thus the hull plug, now almost finished in the vast construction shed on the banks of the Medina in Cowes, could be said to be more Richards than anyone else.

Unsurprisingly the man himself will have none of it. In an interview for madforsailing he refused to accept that the finished lines are anything other than a product of the entire design team. The core of that group is led by Derek Clark and is made up of Richards together with the two Japanese designers, Akihiro Kanai and Taro Takahashi, who came over from Japan with the two 2000 generation AC boats which the British syndicate has used for training.

Outside the core group, other key influences were Rob Humphreys on hull forms, Hugh Welbourn on appendages and Phil Morrison in a general role which included a large amount of statistical analysis which helped to sort out the wheat from the chaff from the tank sessions.

The way Richards views it, the whole team moved a long way in intellectual terms over the 10 months that it was at work, so that every subsequent re-thinking of hull form could be said to be the product of everyone involved. He also stresses that each new concept was heavily refined as it went through Kanai's CFD programme and the VPP programmes used by the team and then the sessions in the tank at Wolfson. "It's very much a group thing and I'd rather the whole thing is regarded as a team effort," said Richards. "The hull originates from one that I did but it's been through Aki's VPP and it's been through the tank and we could all humm and harr about it - it could just as easily have come from anyone," he added.

The striking aspect about Richards's own reflections on the work is how much he has enjoyed his task. You get the impression the call to come up with Britain's first America's Cup hull since 1987 was a dream come true for Richards who revelled in the chance to experiment and cross-fertilise on ideas in a quiet top-floor design office in Cowes where everyone was encouraged to chip in.

What is missing is any sense that the team felt the pressure of having to come up with a single hull which, at one go, had to provide Walker and his crew with a fast vehicle yet one which could not afford to be too radical in any direction. In fact Richards believes the design team would have been over-stretched - hampered even - had it been tasked to produce two different hulls in the time allotted.

Now that the main work is complete, Richards is able to give madforsailing a fuller account of how the team set about its work. He summarised the underlying challenge in the America's Cup class as follows. "Essentially what you are trying to do is get as long a sailing length as possible. There are two ways of doing that, one of which is to take up the length at the back of the boat and the other, at the front. From that point of view there are very different shapes. Last time round Young America was trying to pick up length at the front while the Kiwis were trying the reverse. We have no idea where everybody else is going to be this time."

However, as a general feel, Richards and his colleagues do not expect to see any of their rivals including the Kiwis, making a quantum leap in performance terms this time round. "It's a game of subtleties," was how he put it.

The design team with one of the test models