Mills Mini Maxi

We look at Andrés Soriano's 68 footer Alegre and get a video guided tour of her from Led Pritchard

A feather in the cap for designer Mark Mills was his 68ft IRC boat Alegre winning line honours in the Rolex Middle Sea last week ahead of the hotshot crews on the STP 65 Moneypenny and Rosebud, and 20 minutes ahead of the former on corrected time.

Built by New England Boatworks in Newport, RI alongside the Reichel Pugh 68 Bella Mente and launched in the early summer, Alegre was conceived for race veteran Andrés Soriano, one time Chairman and CEO of San Miguel. Largely based in the Philippines, Soriano has owned a series of Swans, the most recent being the Swan 80, Maligaya. These he raced actively on the Asian circuit, but he admits that Alegre is the first pure race boat he has owned since 1984 when he had the sistership to Neville Crichton’s first Shockwave, a Frers 43 called Bandido, built by Mick Cookson’s father. “We did Southern Cross series representing the Hong Kong team and we did Pan Am Cup at the time and Big Boat Series,” he recalls.

“The reason for this is to enjoy this boat with my son,” says Soriano of his latest boat. “He is very keen so I said, this is a good time to do something with my son and enjoy it. So I put the project together with Dave Williams and got Nipper [Guy Salter] on board and went around and took a look at where we would do it and came up with this size.”



Soriano says he wasn’t keen on a box rule like the STP65 and his initial conversations with designer Mark Mills were about having a fast cruising boat. However studying what IRC seemed to be doing in this size range Soriano made the call to go for a pure race boat although with a ‘better than race boat’ finish and a well laid out interior, enclosed head, etc. The size of the boat also grew from 67 to 68.8ft LOA or 21m.

According to Mark Mills Alegre was designed primarily for inshore windward-leewards in light to medium conditions (ie below 16 knots) given the boat would be mainly sailing in the US and the Med “to try and overcome the fact that when you are you up against boats like Numbers, if you don’t have a fully pro team and a multiple sail set per year, and that sort of thing, it is really quite hard. I think we succeeded pretty well in that he [Soriano] gets to do a lot of his own driving and a lot of the guys on the boat aren’t paid pros. But the trade off is, for example, with the narrower hull shape - you know that you aren’t going to be able to do an offshore reaching race, and be able to compete with the wide-sterned reaching boats like Moneypenny.” Hence the big smiles post Rolex Middle Sea when she and Moneypenny broke free of the fleet and she managed to hold off the STP65 in the top end of her range.

Mills continues: “It led to a slightly narrower boat and because it is IRC it is always still paying attention to weight. We recovered the stability by having a fairly large bulb compared to the boats around us, that allows us to get away with slightly less draft. Andy didn’t want to go incredibly deep on draft in the way that the STP65s have and I think in the future you are going to have to see IRC backing off on draft. So it suits us that we didn’t go berserk.”

While the boat is primarily for inshore use, it was also designed to have some offshore potential including for example a delivery across the Atlantic on her own bottom. For this reason while the construction is carbon/Nomex, engineer Steve Koopman (partner with Alinghi’s chief engineering guru Dirk Kramer at STK) was asked not to go too extreme with the structure. In retrospect this has proved a smart move with several of the new breed of Mini Maxis hitting this hard, but with consequences - for example Numbers is having to have her deck replaced. Others deeply involved with conjuring up Alegre included Team Shosholoza’s CFD man, Charles Crosbie and Kevin George at North UK who looks after the sail program.

Unlike the STP65s Alegre has a fixed keel (theirs are lifting as is Numbers'), but like them she is a bowsprit boat. Alegre’s hull shape does not have such powerful stern sections as her rivals and Mills says he does not advocate chines on boats that are primarily for windward-leeward racing. He has a 64ft IRC boat on the stocks at the moment that is even more inshore-orientated and while this has what he describes as a “very chunky back end” it is still not chined. “The issue with chines is that if you just want to reach they are just fantastic and they have a job to play,” he says. “The problem is if you are trying to go upwind they on their own have issues about alignment with waterflow and making sure you are not creating more drag than if you didn’t have them.”

Chines can also have a particularly nasty effect when they dig in. There have been reports of boats with these immediately gaining alarming amounts of lee helm when the chine joins the water flow.

To us Alegre’s rudder seemed well forward but Mills says that they tried it a metre further forward still. “It turned out that the distortion to the waterplane was not improved significantly by moving it another metre forward," he says. "The problem is that once these things heel over, it is a relatively narrow boat compared to its peers, but it is still fairly hard sectioned at the back end and once it is heeled over you are exposing all that centreline area and it gets worst the further aft you go. So you have to find a balance between rudder size and longitudinal position.” They are looking at changing to a small rudder for next season.

The cockpit layout is very TP52 with the sole opening out to almost the full beam of the boat at the transom, but with sidedecks running all the way to the stern so the crew can perch there in comfort downwind.

Like most of the Mini Maxis Alegre has a lot of hydraulics, only that hers can be powered. This includes the forestay, jib car in/out and up/down, outhaul, vang, Cunningham all of which can be controlled by push button. The boats’ hydraulics are made by Cariboni and use their new ‘high pressure’ system which oddly means that the piping and hydraulic rams are smaller (several of the new VO70s also have this). To save weight on Alegre they have an arrangement where single rams can operate the jib fairlead in/out and up/down on both sides.

However to improve their rating, the powered hydraulic capability was removed for the Rolex Middle Sea Race. “Inshore it has proven worthwhile,” says Mills of this, “but offshore it is marginal. To be honest if we had thought it through fully we might have tried to go fully either way. We had a single manual pump on the Middle Sea as an experiment to see if we want to do it without push button in the future.”

The hydraulics are electrically powered so there is not the requirement, as found on canting keel boats, to have the engine running all the time. The reason Alegre has them was that Soriano was looking to be able to sail the boat with a smaller crew.

What is perhaps surprising is the very steep learning curve the Alegre crew, as well as those of the other Mini Maxis, have been on. We suppose this is due to out and out grand prix racing under IRC still being a relatively new phenomenon in this size range. Mills admits that his has been a wake-up for him too: “I hadn’t realised how important time in these boats is until I saw the learning curve that Alegre has been on which started with the IRC Nations just bolting things on, then going to Cork, Cowes and Sardinia. At every one of those events the boat took a bigger step than was expected.”

While Alegre suffered the unfortunate occurrence of her engine drive shaft falling out at Cork Week, another issue that has been apparent on many of the new Mini Maxis has been over their balance. “There are specific issues with this size and speed of boat that takes some getting into and it really has benefitted Numbers that she has been around for longer than anyone else,” says Mills. “It is interesting that people are sailing around with more rig rake than you would expect - that is everyone, not just Alegre."

As to why this might be Mills continues: “One of the suggestions has to do with mast: cord lengths and the particular Reynolds number that the boats are sailing at is that maybe they are starting to get attached flow around the back side of the rig which is altering the centre of effort of the rig. Normally that much rake would be an indication that you don’t have sufficient rudder balance and that you are raking aft to load up the rudder. When I compare our rig against Moneypenny’s, sailing upwind, you could see that both our rigs were setting up with more rake than either office presumably originally wanted to put into it. And I think the more we’ve heard about what has happened with these boats, it turns out that some boats have been shifting rig locations in the boat and maybe shifting keel locations which is an expensive and complicated thing to do. So it is an interesting question mark.”

If time in the boat is important then this should bode well for the Alegre crew who have already carried out a packed season in 2008 culminating in the Middle Sea. The boat is now heading for La Ciotat where she is going to be laid up for the winter prior to taking part in the Mini Maxi circuit in 2009 kicking off in April with the Hublot Palmavela.

For the nuts and bolts on Alegre , see crewman Led Pritchard's guided tour here - part 1 and part 2 , plus the photos on the following pages....