The new cat revolution

Tornado Olympic double silver medallist, multihull guru and sailmaker Randy Smyth enthuses about the Volvo catamaran

Basilica may be having a good run of it lately winning in Baltimore and dominating in Portsmouth but the team to beat in the VX40 is still Tommy Hilfiger helmed by none other than Tornado double silver medallist and cat guru and sailmaker Randy Smyth.

Smyth currently spends much of his time out sailing with what he calls The Rocketeer Racing Team, consisting of Jon Farrar, Stan Schreyer and himself. Off the water he continues to run Smyth Sails, reasonably unique in that since 1989 he has been designing the sails and then sub-contracting out to manufacturers to do the physical making. This, as Smyth points out, means that he is not tied down trying to run a little shop and so frees up a little more time for the sailing.

But over recent weeks Smyth has been concentrating on his standing within the Volvo Extreme 40 class, he currently leads by a slender seven points over the British Basilica team.

Smyth was a late comer to the VX40 but somehow seems to have managed to find a spectacularly suitable crew and sponsorship combination. “I had been in contact with Mitch Booth and the organisers and said that I had a whole team all ready to roll," recounts the amiable Smyth. "Apparently Hilfiger was calling him up and saying that they were ready to sponsor someone but they did not have a team. So Mitch just put the two of us together and it all seems to have worked out well.”

Although Smyth was a late arrival to the VX40 circuit his team is a carefully assembled group of close racing friends and up and coming individuals. “Our standard crew is myself, Jonathan Farrar who is on the mainsheet and tactics; he has done lot of Tornado crewing, some Olympic trials and stuff in the US. He now does a lot of Olympic Tornado coaching so he is a pretty active guy. Then there is Stan Schreyer who is the trimmer and he is an up and coming Tornado skipper who was also loosely involved in the C Class stuff. Then we are a bit creative on our fourth person - we often go with a local.”



The team he sails with if very important Smyth, which is why he made sure he was sailing with people he could trust. “One thing about these boats is you can’t compete without a team that is working together. It is all about working as a group and when you have a weak part of your team you have to work out why that weak part is there together.” He goes on to say, not only is it a case of being able to support each other and work out weaknesses, just sailing the boat in itself is a challenge. Smyth comments that it has taken them time as a team to get the mechanics of sailing the VX 40 right, that is manoeuvres, startline technique etc, all of which had to be sorted before they could even think about straight line speed, boat set-up and tactics.

Although he now largely sails big multihulls when it comes to the VX40 class it is relatively unique in comprising crews made up largely of Tornado and dinghy cat talent. “I think you will see and are seeing the top level people coming up from small boats but you rarely see big boat sailors coming down. Some might but in my opinion that is where the talent usually is, in the small boat sailors,” he says. As well as inherent talent Smyth believes that theVX40s are too much like a dinghy to be sailed by big boat sailors without the necessary skills. “The guys that can react without a computer and an analysis of it will be the ones that do well. You don’t even have time to talk to your tactician out there. If you get a little shift you have to tack straight away, if you wait 30 seconds you are well past the layline. It is all instinct out there and that is all small boat stuff."

The size of the VX40s and their small cat characteristics make them almost unique. However, he has been involved with classes before which have shared some similar characteristics in both design and racing style, specifically Formula 40 and the ProSail circuits back in the 1980s. While the boats may look physically quite similar, there have been marked improvements in the intervening year. “Formula 40 is 20 years older than the VX40, as such the obvious differences lie in materials and weight,” he says. “The carbon is obviously the biggest change and that buys you about 40 percent in weight savings. The Formula 40s were fibreglass with an aluminium mast and beams, state of the art back then.” The displacement of a VX40 stands in at 1,250kg compared to the 1,800kg minimum weight of a Formula 40 (and often they were heavier...)



Smyth is particularly impressed with the VX40 given it was such a risky concept. He thinks it was particularly dicey to produce five boats without building a prototype but says the whole team such as designer Yves Loday to builder Marstrom down are highly experienced and have done their jobs superbly.

After sailing the VX40 since the first event in Sanxenxo, Smyth is in a good position to asses the merits of this state of the art, high speed machine. “The beauty of the VX40 is that it has one job and it can do that job to the very top level. So many boats try to be good at too many things and they end up doing everything averagely," he says with veiled reference to the Formula 40 class that tried to be both suitable for inshore and offshore racing. "But this one is superlative at manoeuvring, flying a hull and in light winds. It has a pretty broad range of winds speeds it can sail in but most importantly it is dramatic to spectators and because it is all carbon it is up on one hull almost all day long so anyone that doesn’t know about sailing can still appreciate it.”

Although the VX40 has clearly won Smyth’s heart there are some issues with the format he flags up. One is over the courses. The VX40 is a radical class capable of high drama and massive speeds, and yet they are still sent around primarily windward/leeward courses. Although this offer up the fairest form of racing they do not necessarily show-off VX40 racing at its best.

While the intention of the organisers was to hold racing as close in to shore as possible, logistically this has proved hard in reality but Smyth feels it is essential for spectators to get the best view of the racing. He points out the Baltimore racing was easily the most spectacular to date exactly because it was close into the shore and had buildings in the background. This provided the audience the chance to really see just how fast these boats go. “To me VX40 racing should be different so that any guy on the beach could see that this is full on right to the wall action. If you had a reach back and forth, so the leaders are coming back straight past the people at the back, and with both boats doing 25 knots they would be crossing a 50 knots and that would be awesome.”

New formats in exciting locations could be on the cards for the VX40s in the future and there is much speculation about exactly what will happen with these boats at the end of the Volvo Ocean Race. An announcement about this seems imminent. In the meantime Smyth is confident about what may happen in the short term. “I think the rest of this year we will be tagged onto already running sailing events. Next season is going to be a whole stand alone VX40 programme but that has yet to be officially announced."

Typically Smyth tries not to spread himself to thin and as such he is not a part of the small cat scene anymore. He says that he is trying to put all of his focus into larger multihulls (aside from the VX40 he regularly races a Farrier tri in the US). Nor is he likely to venture back into maxi-multihulls. Having sailed around the world with his old Formula 40 crewman Cam Lewis on Team Adventure in The Race, Smyth feels no compunction to return to the offshore scene. “I did Team Adventure around the world and for me that as a little bit abstract for my way of sailing. When you never see any other boats except for on a computer screen it is like playing a video game while you’re sailing. I like wind and waves and competitors that you can see all the time."

So we can look forward to seeing more of Smyth in the VX40 over the coming months. What we are most impressed with is that at 51 years of age now he seems to have lost none of his verve or his competitive-ness on the race course. Following his dramatic capsize at the Portsmouth VX40 racing that may have left lesser men shaken, it was Smyth was all for continuing in the next race once his catamaran had been righted.