Controversial conclusion

We speak to some of the heavy hitters in Class SZ at ACC Bank Cork Week

ACCBank Cork Week concluded on Friday in a less than ideal way. Going into the final race, two of the titans of Class SZ were slogging it out for the lead: Niklas Zennstrom’s Tim Powell-driven modified TP52 Ran, with a largely UK crew of rockstars, just a point ahead of American Dan Meyers’ Judel-Vrolijk 66 Numbers, sailed by a mostly Alinghi crew, led by the silver fox himself - Brad Butterworth.

But as the SZ boats were due to head off on ACCBank Cork Week’s unique slalom course sadly there was a severe cock-up with the starting sequence. Tim Powell describes what happened: “The race committee screwed up monumentally. They got a bit confused with their sound signals and flags up and down… They got the timing wrong. They dropped the AP and they waited a minute and then they took the class flag up and then a minute later the preparatory went up but then three minutes later we were supposed to have started, rather than four minutes later. So they started the race a minute earlier than it should have been started and there were one or two boats that shot off the line and were a minute up the track as the rest of the fleet were waiting to start.”

In the end coming off the water Numbers won the final race on corrected and Ran came third, with Colm Barrington’s modified TP52 Flash Glove in between. This meant that the American boat had won Class SZ by just one point. Understandably, Ran protested the race committee, but the outcome was not the race getting flicked, as the Ran crew had expected, but their being awarded an extra point. This drew them on to equal points with Numbers, but on count back Numbers won the regatta due to her having scored an impressive five bullets in eight races to Ran’s two: Not an ideal end to an otherwise generally well received regatta, certainly for the Ran crew.

On board Numbers in the final race they had also been slow to react to the chaos of the start, but were ahead of the fleet at the mark. “In the end I think we would have won that race anyway, because we won by a long way,” recounted Brad Butterworth. “We were going pretty well.”

In Class SZ, Numbers was the third highest rated boat behind American George David’s supermaxi, Rambler and Andres Soriano’s new Mark Mills 68 Allegre. However she spent most of the regatta nipping at the heels of the supermaxi.



“We have been uncharacteristically close to her,” admitted Butterworth of how they got on against the biggest boat at the regatta. “But with those boats [the supermax], to sail those short courses, even the three mile course, it is pretty hard for them to get away. And downwind when it is blowing - and a lot of this regatta there’s been some good breeze - we go the same speed or the same speed as them downwind anyway. It is too hard to crew those boats. And the race courses here are quite interesting because they have a different race course each day. Today was the slalom course - it was a real jig-fest.”

A unique aspect of ACCBank Cork Week is that it is not simply windward-leewards, nor ‘Cowes Week’ courses around a variety of buoys, but a mix of many different courses including a slalom. “It is interesting. We’ve enjoyed it. Even if we hadn’t won I think we would have enjoyed it too,” said Butterworth.

Since we saw the boat last year in Annapolis shortly after she was launched (read about her here) few changes have been made other than slightly increasing the head of the main. In addition to their America’s Cup crew Numbers had the additional help of ‘local knowledge’ in the form of one time NCB Ireland Whitbread round the world race skipper Joe English. “We were in good shape,” continues Butterworth. “We didn’t that many mistakes all the way round. And the race we didn’t score that great, you were reaching up and down and we couldn’t get away from the small boats and you are right up into the basin and back out to the sea.”

Butterworth refers to the first race of the week where the wind crapped out at the start, leaving boats heading up the beat both on the wind and under spinnaker.

As to ACCBank Cork Week itself as a regatta, Butterworth says: “I would rate it right up there. We picked the regattas we were going to go to first before we designed the boat. We came here because we’d heard it was a great event and you have a lot of fun and there’s always a bit of wind. And it’s just been perfect. It is not really summertime, but the sailing has been pretty good.”

Butterworth says that Numbers owner Dan Meyers also loved it. Meyers stayed on board his new Royal Huisman-built 170ft long Grand Banks schooner replica Meteor he had brought along to the regatta and he and Butterworth had had the opportunity to play the famous Old Head golf course in Kinsale.

From here Numbers goes directly to Porto Cervo for the Maxi Yacht Rolex Cup (she was supposed to do Skandia Cowes Week, but there is not enough time to get to the Med) followed by the Voiles de St Tropez. The boat will then be shipped back to the States. While Numbers isn’t going to be in Cowes, Butterworth will be heading across to the island on the Friday before Cowes to support Ed Baird’s Alinghi Extreme 40 campaign.

Meanwhile Ran, along with a considerable numbers of the boats at Cork Week, are now heading back to the Solent ready for Cowes. Aside from the debacle of the last day, Tim Powell says that they found the regatta really good. “We have been really happy with how Ran has performed. With Numbers there is not a lot we can do. Our aim this week was to be the first TP52 and see how that panned out in the SZ class. We won the TPs with a day to spare. We had a really really good day on Thursday and were chuffed to bits about that. With Numbers there is not a lot you can do about them. You are either going to beat them or they are going to be miles ahead of you. It is a very very good IRC boat and it is a class act which is always going to be hard to beat. It does show that IRC is working quite well, when you come into the last day of the regatta with a 66ft and a 52footer vying for first place.”

Throughout the week, apart from the first day, there was generally good breeze that topped around 22 knots on the Tuesday.



Another heavy hitter in Cork was American Jim Swartz and his crew on board the new Reichel-Pugh designed STP65 Moneypenny. They had also been caught out in the bizarre conditions the first race was run in when they finished 11th on corrected. Disappointly throughout the week their best result was a fourth. “Let’s call it a learning experience,” said Swartz. “The boat is still very new. I think we got better every day, but we still have a long way to go and today we blew out a spinnaker.”

And the regatta? “It is fabulous. We even got some sunshine today. The sailing conditions have been fantastic. We could have used a little more sunlight.”

Typically Swartz has both Paul Cayard and Gavin Brady calling the shots for him, but the moustachioed one is currently away sailing in the Transpac with his family. Cayard will be back for the Maxi Worlds, where Swartz says he is looking forward to again lining up against fellow STP65 Rosebud as well as Neville Crichton’s new fractionally larger IRC boat, Alfa Romeo.

So, while it has been great having numerous America’s Cup stars in town - it has certainly put Cork Week more on the international stage - is this good for the sport? Numbers is a purpose-built IRC boat sailed by the world’s very best professional sailors while Ran is a well modified TP52, also sailed by an elite all-pro crew. The question is should the majority of competitors be in awe of such top campaigns being there, privileged to sail in the same waters or less than satisfied given that their chance of winning is greatly reduced?

Certainly there is an arms race on at the moment at this end of the fleet. If one takes the great fleet of ‘modified TP52s’ we now have, campaign budgets vary widely from Ran at the top, followed by Charles Dunstone’s Rio and Stuart Robinson’s Stay Calm and with the likes of Rob Lutener and Martin Elwood Henri Lloyd Cutting Edge and Benny Kelly’s Pantera towards the lower end. Once competitive boats, like the Farr 52s Chernikeff and Bear of Britain, are now off the scale. Not surprisingly this order is to a large extent based on the size of each campaign’s war chest, a scenario we have seen time and time again before in yachting.

(Read more about the IRCed TP52s here)

One of the first to see the writing on the wall is canny Irishman Colm Barrington, owner of the TP52 Flash Glove. Rob Greenhalgh, a regular on Barrington’s collection of race boats, describes their week: “It was tough. We ended up third [in Class SZ] which was probably as well as we were ever going to do given Number and Ran - one is a complete bandit and the other one is really well sailed or certainly better than us. We beat Rio and Stay Calm and the others. We didn’t necessarily sail that well but had a good week and enjoyed ourselves.”

However: “Colm is selling the boat. It has turned into a bit of an arms race. We sail with four or five pros on board and I think he doesn’t want to race against professional drivers or teams with 15 pros on board.”

While we wish there were more Niklas Zennstroms fielding fully-pro campaigns and the game was generally raised in the UK, sadly there aren’t. Given this we suspect the present level is too high for the majority of owners to sustain in the UK/Ireland coming at a time when we are into what appears to be one of the most severe economic crisis to have hit the country for several decades.

So what to do? One solution would be to introduce an owner-driver rule and limit the pros. But there is no owners association for the modified TP52s/new 50+ft IRC boats to introduce such legislation and even if there were it is probably too late to make such admenments. In an ideal world at regattas such as Cork there would of course be a Grand Prix rule class in which the Numbers and Rans of this world competed, leaving the amateurs to race under IRC (as was originally intended). You could call the Grand Prix rule class IRM… Or three classes – amateur, semi-pro and fully pro.

In fact what is probably needed, now most of the world is racing under IRC, is some component or addition to IRC that legislates for owner/pro driver and the number of profession crew on board.

Get to it chaps…

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