The all-black competition

Five boats this year, 10 next says Coutts

Russell Coutts is a man with fingers in many pies. Aside from his historic record in the America's Cup, this year he has won the hotly contested Rolex Farr 40 Worlds, this time sailing with Vincenzo Onorato's Mascalzone Latino team, had a surprisingly lacklustre TP 52 program with Jaime Yllera and George Andreadis' Lexus, has won the Bol d'Or Rolex in a D35 catamaran [yes, he remembered the nav lights this time!] and been campaigning a Swan 601. At present Coutts is in Trieste in the build-up to this weekend's Barcolana, the world's largest single start regatta, where five of the all-black RC 44s he co-designed, are sailing their first regatta.

Racing was canned yesterday due to the local Bora blowing 30+ knots but Wednesday the RC 44s were able to get in four races, with further races scheduled today and tomorrow.

The RC 44, a boat Coutts conceived with designer Andrej Justin, was first launched just over a year ago (read more about the boat here) and aside from his intense racing schedule, Coutts has been busy masterminding the forthcoming RC 44 circuit while carrying out some yacht broking.

Coutts is happy with the way the class is developing but expresses some frustration over the pace at which boats are being produced. To date all the RC 44s have been built in a facility in Budapest, Hungary, by a composite spar manufacturer called Pauger. "They wanted to do this project and in some way they were one of the only ones crazy enough to do it - with full-on carbon infusion, female moulds and no filler and no paint required - a full-on, carbon-finished boat. So they were prepared to do it and have done a really good job," says Coutts.

Production was also to have started at composite boat builder V1 in Dubai in March but Coutts says they are way behind schedule there. To date V1 have completed the female tooling and the class measurer and Andrej Justin have been out to Dubai to give them the thumbs up but have yet to produce a boat.

The concept of the RC 44, as we have written previously, is very Coutts and also very unique: it is a state of the art racing machine in terms of its design and construction, for example it uses the latest carbon fibre build techniques, with a powerful state of the art sail plan including a flat top main of around 72sqm, jibs of typically 54-60sqm and up to around 117sqm of genniker. Yet it is also a production boat, designed for a semi-pro crew.

There is an obvious comparison to be made with the Farr 40 and Coutts reckons his boat is even more one design. "The way they are building the boats they can control the weight to incredible accuracy. With the five boats we have got out racing here, the carbon component of the boats are all within 1kg of each other, which is amazing for a 44ft boat." One suspects this is the reason the builders are struggling to churn them out.



The RC 44 class is the same as the Farr 40 in terms of allowing four Category 3 pro crew, but allows only a Cat 1 driver, rather than a Cat 1 owner driver as the Farr 40 class require. Beyond that there is a weight limit to control crew numbers. In Trieste for example Mascalzone Latino are racing with nine, while the four other teams are eight up.

But while the Farr 40 makes many design concessions towards its owner driver and semi-pro crew (relatively big foils and fixed backstay on a hydraulic ram), this is very much less the case with the RC 44 which is much more a full-on grand prix racing machine complete with combination topmast/running backstays and spindly state of the art foils - one imagines it is a handful for the average cat 1 helmsman to steer.

"It is a much more complex boat to sail because you have a trim tab and smaller foils and more adjustment on a lot of the functions," continues Coutts. "For example you have the TP 52 system with the headstay ram to adjust rake. There is quite a bit of tuning with the rig. It is continuous rigging, so the rigging all comes down to the chainplates, etc."

While the RC 44 hull and deck gear are tightly controlled, conversely there is more variation in the sail plan than there is with the Farr 40. "The class rule for sails is very open, not only for different manufacturers, it is open for even the sizes of the sails," he explains. "We’ve got restrictions obviously on gennikers, on the luff, leech and foot lengths. Mainsails have a girth measurement. The genoas we’ve just got the luff, leech and LP and that’s it. Otherwise you are free to do what you want with roach and it's the same with the gennikers - you are free to do with them what you want. There are no mid-girth measurements."

So does it make even the TP 52 seem slightly pedestrian? "No, the TP 52 is a really good boat," Coutts retorts. "We sailed the boat in 20 knots of breeze today and we were really happy with the way we have got it going now. The rig is tuned and the guys who have done the boats were pretty impressed." To date the top speed has been 21 knots in 24 knots of breeze and fully tuned up and in the groove they have seen 8.6 knots upwind. "That is a pretty good number. So it moves along okay," says Coutts.

While the boat is over a year old now and only five boats have been produced, Coutts says there are more in the pipeline. "It takes time to build a class. People are waiting to see how the regatta program will be finalised for next year. We are targeting to have six [regattas] and we’ll probably end up with 10 boats on the starting line for the beginning of next year as long as they are produced in time. So that is not a bad start." These boats will still be from the Budapest facility while V1 in Dubai are supposed to have some additional orders.

This year two more regattas for RC 44 will follow the Barcolana this year - a demonstration match racing event in Biograd, Croatia on 21-22 October and Portoroz, Slovenia on 27-29 October.

At present the planned regatta format is four days, two of short, two lap windward-leewards (on Wednesday they held four races) and two of match racing. Coutts says a couple of his owners sailed on the RC 44s at the Dubai Match Race earlier this year and enjoyed the format to the extent that they wanted to include this style of racing on their circuit. "These boats seem pretty well suited to that and let’s see if people enjoy it. The venues like it, because it is a four day format and there are two different stories."

18 months or so ago when Coutts was discussing the RC 44, there was mention of other boats of a similar type but different size being on the cards, however Coutts says that at present he is only focussing on the 44. The boat is still being refined. "We have had the first regatta and now we have really put it to a hard test, there are little tweaks we can do to the deck equipment to make it a little bit more refined. While keeping it a really really tightly controlled one design class, we don’t want to have something stupid on the boat when there’s a better solution. So we’re slowly evolving but evolving in such a way that we keep the class as a strict one design."


TP 52

For 2007 Coutts says he is going to continue focussing on the RC 44 as well as the TP 52 class. This year at Copa del Rey, he introduced his Swedish Swan 601 owner Torbjorn Tornqvist to the class, and now he is running Tornqvist's new Artemis TP 52 campaign and has a Vrolijk boat commissioned.

However he comes to this following the disappointing performance on the Breitling MedCup circuit this year on Lexus. On paper George Andreadis and Jaime Yllera's team looked unbeatable crew-wise with Coutts, Paul Cayard and Gavin Brady in the afterguard, but the results they achieved were average and Lexus finished the championship sixth overall.

"Our expectations were to achieve much higher levels than we did," says Coutts. "I wasn’t happy about that and I don’t think anyone was within the program. It was the combination of sailing badly and not making the correct decisions in terms of the preparation of the boat. The only decent result was in the Breitling Cup when we finished third. Obviously I want to try and avoid repeating that next year."