First stab

We talk to Team Shosholoza designer Jason Ker about the team's new Version 5 yacht

Just over a year ago British designer Jason Ker packed his bags and moved from Southampton to Cape Town to set up the design office for the South African America's Cup challenger, Team Shosholoza. A year later and the team have gone from having effectively no America's Cup design background to the launch of what is to date the first brand new boat built to Version 5 of the ACC rule.

On Friday the public in Cape Town were given a glimpse of the new hull and...it looks - not surprisingly - just like an America's Cup boat.

For Ker, the design process has had to happen a lot faster than he would have liked. After recruiting his team last year the plan had been to convert RSA 48, the 2000 generation boat they raced last year in Marseilles and Valencia, to version five, putting a new bow and stern on it to make it slightly more up to date.

"By the end of September we had a fair number of design team personnel and we were just getting going," Ker takes up the story. "Then we got asked if we could produce a whole new boat for this year, so we had to settle down and do that. So it has been a big job, to start from scratch to doing a new boat. Having said that I think it has been a worthwhile exercise - we have had the opportunity to go through the loop on every aspect of the design at least once. It has been a good starting point for working on our race boat design for the second boat."

The downside has been the lack of time. The team didn't buy a design package from another team as is now allowed under the Protocol for the 2007 America's Cup and building the new boat started with the design team having only had one month to carry out CFD studies and with zero time in the tank.

"We are putting it up against boat that have had months of CFD and tank work," says Ker when we put it to him that having the only all-new Version 5 boat racing might be an advantage. "You could say we are at a disadvantage putting something on the water in such a fast time, but it gives us an opportunity to move up the ladder a bit in terms of our performance from a 2000 generation boat to something that is hopefully at least an equivalent to a 2003 generation boat. But we then have to learn to sail it to its potential. So it is still a big learning curve once we have got it out on the water."

Since we wrote about them in October, the Shosholoza design team has grown, particularly on the CFD side. "We started off with one fluid dynamicist and we now have about three and a half," continues Ker. "On the structures side we’ve still got Phil Lawrence and Tom James from High Modulus and from here we had Dave Johnson and they work really well as a team together. David has got an extremely high level of technical skill with the FEA and composites and the High Modulus guys have a very good practical understanding of what is needed and what can be built. So it is a good combination."

The design team now comprises nine full time staff and nine freelancers. In terms of past Cup experience, Ker says they have two on the CFD side and one on structures.

As ever with embarking on a Cup design project the first job has been to invest time in ensuring that the design tools are accurate. "We’ve had to set up the knowledge in house for everything," says Ker. "We’ve had to go through the process of setting up our tools to get to the point that we understand and believe their output. All those kind of things take a lot of time. The teams who have been running for a many years, they can take it for granted that such and such a tool gives an answer within a certain percentage of accuracy. We have had to get to that point from scratch."

To do this they have been materials testing while trialling different CFD packages, comparing the output with results from the tank test data. "There are a lot of little details with a Cup boat and if you are starting from scratch you can’t just pull one out of the cupboard and say ‘right, well we’ll do it like that but modify the radius here’. We’ve literally had to sit down and design from a blank sheet of paper everything on the boat. It has been a lot of work."

The result that was unveiled fleeting on Friday before being loaded onto a ship bound for Europe, is a boat with a body closest in section to Alinghi and a bow that Ker says isn't as deep as Alinghi's - it is more like Oracle or OneWorld. "We didn’t get enough data to be confident on exactly what we were doing on the bow, so we went for middle of the road, for something which wasn’t going to be bad either way. In many ways, it is a starting point and we can always get the chainsaw out at any stage we want. The hard research program was only about 5% of the way through when we started building so it is not really indicative of what we are going to do for the second boat. Having said that we think it should be reasonably good. We took a look at what was already out there and tried to see what we liked and what we didn’t like in the different features of all the different boats. So it is not like we have skipped a generation."

In terms of designing to version five of the rule, Ker says there is little significant different from the previous incarnation of the rule. "It is pretty minor. For an existing boat you are talking about 25mm of floatation change and you modify the bow to match up to the new length. It is not a bad thing, but when we look at it we don’t really differentiate between what is good for version 4 or version 5."

While several Cup teams have told thedailysail that this time round they expect the main developments to be in the rig, Ker is not so convinced. "I would say there is a limited amount you can do to the hull or the rig frankly. I think they might be right in the differences between hulls will be quite small in 2007. I would also expect the differences between rigs will be quite small come 2007. However the differences between hulls and rigs now will be quite big still. Because of the racing I suspect that everyone will evolve to a more homogenous level than is typically the case in AC racing when thing things arrive out of the blue, only to discover that everyone has been doing something completely different.

"Having said that people will be trying to avoid revealing what they have been doing in the background, so what you see sailing in 2006 could be quite different from what you see sailing in 2007 for example. We don’t know if anyone is going to pull a blinder on something. So everyone says this is a program to do with rigs, but I think rigs are quite developed as well. I think your program is about getting everything absolutely refined – rigs and keels and hulls. I think the differences will be very small in performance and people will be looking more at tactical differences and the characteristics of the boat rather than ultimate speed around the course differences."

Led by ex-GBR Challenge boatbuilder Tony Evans, the new Shosholoza has been under construction since November. Ker says that they have managed to pick up a lot of composites talent in South Africa, both in pre-pregs and boat building. "There were some guys who came from other industries. The aerospace industry down here is in pretty good shape. There is some good technology on the high tech side of things because there was a time during apartheid here that they were embargoed from buying things and they had to figure out how to do them themselves. The country had military helicopter design programs and missile programs, so you can imagine there are some good skills. It is a bit like the Israelis in terms of them having to figure out how to do things themselves."

While the hull is en route from South Africa, the giant keel is on a ship from Australia while the fin is being air freighted and the mast is still in build in Italy. The whole package is scheduled to come together towards the last week in May.

Only one of their boats is being shipped to Europe this season. Work will start on the construction of the second boat early in 2006 and that will then be shipped to Valencia and only then will the team will start their two boat testing in earnest.

"We may end up changing a few things pretty rapidly," says Ker, of their new boat. "But it is still worthwhile as an exercise, because the team has had to go from version zero, to a design team with America’s Cup experience. We have gone through the process and we have designed the boat and we know how long things take and we know what solutions we’re happy with and we’re going to keep and we know which ones we are going to work harder on for the next boat. It has been a really valuable experience."