Swedish Match one design

The Daily Sail talks to legendary designer Pelle Petterson and has a go on the boat with Magnus Holmberg's team

Last year in our interview with Swedish Match Tour Director Scott MacLeod he spoke about his desire to see all the events on his circuit sailed in the same fleet of boats.

Here in Marstrand at this year's Swedish Match Cup it appears that McLeod's dream is coming true as tied up to the dock here for all the match racing community to see is the brand new Swedish Match 40 footer match racing one design. Yesterday The Daily Sail had a burn up on the new boat with former Tour winner Magnus Holmberg and his Swedish Stora Enso match racing team.

Conveniently for MacLeod and the Tour, the idea for the one design was picked up by a Swedish marketing company SailNet who teamed up with the legendary Swedish designer and sailor Pelle Petterson to work on a suitable design. However their brief was quite specifically MacLeod's, conceived over a number of years and with input from skippers such as Paul Cayard.

"The boat should fit a box rule," jokes Petterson (left) - in as much as it had to fit into a 40ft container. "I tried to make the maximum boat for that – so that dictated the width, the length, the height and some other features, like the keel coming into the boat, the rudder comes off..." Cleverly a massive padeye on the top of the keel is the lifting point for the boat - the keel pulls up into the boat and then the boat lifts up with it. The rig also comes in two pieces.

The Swedish Match Tour are keen to increase their association with the America's Cup so as a result the 40 ressembles a mini-ACC boat - slab sided with a very narrow beam, long overhangs and a damned great keel. "I wanted to try to look an ACC look-a-like," Petterson freely admitted to The Daily Sail. "The dimensions actually came out at about half that of the big boats."

Some people were wondering today whether it was such a good idea to simply scale down a Cup boat, but Peterson can't see the problem with this. "We had a good run when we came down from the yard in very fresh conditions – and we had no problem. I’m surprised it came out right away so that we could let people go sailing in it," says the relieved designer. The boat was built by Swedish builder Maxi Yachts sub contracted to small yard called Marin Custom just to the north of Marstrand. Future boats will be built by Maxi Yachts themselves.

In terms of the handling the boat, it had to be nothing out of the normal. It has a conventional spinnaker pole arrangement that Holmberg's bowman seemed to be happy end-for-ending with symmetric kites. "We debated - should we have an asymmetric?" says Petterson. "I think for this kind of racing it is more fun to see these guys working the pole..."

The single backstay is adjustable (maybe it'll get a good IMS rating...) and there are swept back spreaders and no runners. Perhaps under normal circumstances the boat might have a tiller, but a wheel has been specified as to spectators or a television audience it is visually more obvious what is happening with a wheel.

"You want to see the guys looking like they are steering the boat," confirms Petterson. "I had long experience of this. When I sailed the America’s Cup I had a 12m with a tiller, because that was the thing. But I have been converted to a wheel. The final thing was I sailed the Masters Series in San Francisco on the J/105 and they draw for boats every day and some had a wheel and some had a tiller and I found out that – damn – a wheel is the thing for a boat this size."

The only unusual part of the rig is the end plate at the top of the flat topped mainsail which doubles as the attachment for the backstay. Petterson thinks it is unlikely this will survive through to the production boat. "The top plate is an experiment, but I think that is overdoing it a little bit. The trick with the ACC boats is they have twin backstays to take the big roach. They have a spring in the top to move the backstay back, but people don’t like that."

The boat comes with mainsail, genoa, jib and kite. Following his first sail today Magnus Holmberg felt that the boat was powered perfectly downwind, but could have done with a little more grunt upwind. He also mentioned that the helm was too balanced. To be fair we were sailing with a jib today when we should have been sailing with the genoa. Holmberg gives the impression he likes to build up a sweat and get physical with the helm when he is seriously involved in a match race. "I think it is good spectator-wise to have a big genoa so that you need a lot of power and technique to use it."

There are rails either side of the foredeck giving it some form of protection and seeing how the pole was getting thrown around between manoeuvres we were slightly surprised a Kevlar deck covered in thick rubber hadn't been specified. Petterson has been around long enough to know the high abuse that these boats are likely to receive and as a result there is a sacrifical bow section that is easily replacible in the event of a collision. Similarly the keel structure is designed to withstand grounding.

The cockpit again is a scaled down version of an AC boat, essentially the hull is hollowed out with the aft part of the topsides forming a kind of coaming around the cockpit at a convenient height to sit on. This all seemed to work pretty well, although we wonder whether crews will start hiking - it felt like you should - when they begin to sail this boat in anger. Someone else pointed out that the topsides aft might be quite susceptible to damage when two boats come together and they bounce off one another.
Just aft of the helm position is an area on top of the flattened out sterm for an on board umpire, cameraman or VIP. At a squeeze you could fit two people in between the chrome handholds at the stern.

The boat is designed for five to sail. Holmberg thinks this is the optimum number as you need two people to control the kite. "Since the boat is so narrow the guy is almost parallel to the spinnaker pole and you get a lot of pressure on that. So you need one guy on that and someone else on the sheet, one on the bow and one on the main."

Holmberg, who was one of the drivers on Victory Challenge, says that stability-wise the boat seemed to behave in a similar way to a Cup boat. "Since it is so narrow it starts heeling quite easily, but since there is so much weight down low it sort of stops and at the end it is very stiff. I think it would be interesting to see how it works in more breeze."

Petterson says that the ballast ratio is not as high as a Cup boat and it is not built from carbon. It is bullet-proof and built in glass in order to take the punish of being match raced in anger.

Sailing against the DS boats used in the Swedish Match Cup yesterday in around 5-7 knots of wind we seemed to be sailing higher but at the same speed and Holmberg says this is to be expected of a boat which is comparitively so narrow and with less wetted area.

Holmberg sums up: "I like the idea of sailing a boat that is a similar image to an America's Cup boat and the fact that you can transport it in a container." And as a boat that Cup teams could use for training? "I think it could be. It is an easy, convenient boat and hopefully it has some of the same characteristics as the America's Cup boats and of course for a Cup team when they move to different places it is convenient. You can put it in a container and off you go."

So with a few minor quibbles, generally the thumbs up from one interested Swede.

More pics on the following pages...

Tomorrow Scott MacLeod reveals how the Swedish Match Tour plan to integrate this boat into their events