TeamOrigin out in force

Sir Keith Mills' team have taken over Nice...

There is a lot dark blue, light blue and white kicking around Nice at present, with a huge TeamOrigin staff and sailing team in residence. Sir Keith Mills’ British America’s Cup team are using the Louis Vuitton Trophy here as a dry run for whenever it might be that they get fully cranked up for the 34th America’s Cup.

Part of the reason is that one of the four V5 boats being used at the Louis Vuitton Trophy Nice is TeamOrigin’s own GBR75, originally Alinghi’s second boat built for Auckland. Less than a month ago she was clad in bubble wrap and tucked away in a shed in Gosport…

“Very late we got a call from the event organisers to see if we could supply boats for the event,” recounts Team Director, Mike Sanderson. “75 was easy – she was in fantastic condition. The guys had done a great job at the end of 2007 to get ready for Acts in 2008. She as literally wrapped and ready to go on a truck. The tricky one was finding a good partner for her. The ideal one was the Oracle boat USA 76 and we were two thirds of the way through putting her together, but unfortunately the bulb for her had been scrapped! So Laurent Esquier had a chat with Stephane Kandler and they offered their boat FRA 93 which has been under our wing. We had guys in the shed giving it as much of a refit as we could in the time that we had – three weeks including getting it here.”

And so, as you may gather, the TeamOrigin shore crew led by Shore Operations Director, David Duff, have been given a thorough work out, with 30 working on the two boats 75 and 93 in the build-up to this event. In the case of 75, she reached Nice via a short visit to her old stomping ground of Valencia.



While in the case of FRA93 there was an element of commissioning, most of the other work carried out was in equalising the boats. “The biggest difference between these boats are the sails, so the biggest thing that we did was to move heaven and earth to make sure that the boats had identical sails on them,” says Sanderson of how they evened out their performance. “The rigs are pretty similar and we set them up in a similar fashion. Then we took the wings off the boats [off the bulbs], so we took that out of the equation and now the boats are as simple as they can be, with identical sails with similar rig set-ups. We talked about doing other things, but making further alterations was going to help them in one wind speed but be a detriment in others. So the sails and the rig set-up was the best way to make them even throughout the whole wind range.”

Intriguingly both boats in this pair have sails, not from K-Challenge or Origin, but from one of the founders of the World Professional Sailing Teams Association (WSTA), BMW Oracle Racing, who’s sails prior to this regatta were down in Auckland, from where they had to be packed up and flown up. Then they had to be made to fit so that they could be interchanged between both 75 and 93 with alterations having to be made to mainsail foot lengths, halyard locks, etc. So, yes folks – in Nice we have an ex-Alinghi boat racing with BMW Oracle Racing sails!

“It is great for us because it has enabled us to utilise another aspect of the team,” continues Sanderson, who reckons TeamOrigin have around 55 people in Nice at present (including a team chef and a physical trainer) while at Juan K’s office in Valencia they have a further 22 working on their new TP52, plus another six working out of the TeamOrigin commercial office in London. “It is only temporary, but that is what we have always done,” continues Sanderson. “We have tried to keep people in the team and we have had different parts of the team working in different phases, when we’ve had something for them to do…”

Meanwhile another group, not from TeamOrigin, has had the easier job of matching Mascalzone Latino’s ITA 90 and 99 V5 boats.

“We’ve sailed all the boats now,” says Sanderson. “The Mascalzone boats were good. They have speared up 90 a little bit because when we sailed 90 v 99 it was all very even. To be honest there is a bit of talk [about boats not being evenly matched]. Certainly when it comes to selection people pick 75 over 93, but whenever we’ve raced them over short courses…it is so different it being a 1.3 or 1.4 mile beat [for the Louis Vuitton Trophy] rather than a three mile drag race, it is more a case of ‘he who gets a good start and gets the first shift right’. Where it would be an issue is where one of the boats can override that, if the speed difference was so bad that you could have a bad start, miss the first shift and still sail past. Until that happens I don’t think there’s much to complain about.”

In terms of the sailing teams, pretty much everyone is here on the sailing team Sanderson had hoped for. The only exceptions are Matt Cornwell who has cleverly timed his marriage to World Match Racing Tour belle Yvonne Reid so that it conflicts with the event, while another ex-Team New Zealander, Barry McKay who did pit for TeamOrigin in Auckland, has not been able to make it due to commitments to a new business. Instead Cornwell has been replaced for this regatta by Alinghi’s Matt Mitchell, while Craig Satterthwaite (ex Alinghi, Pirates of the Caribbean, etc) replaces McKay.

“Apart from that we have everyone we wanted it,” says Sanderson. “The afterguard is the same.” Sanderson’s Volvo Ocean Race winning navigator Stan Honey is presently on board Groupama 3 on the Jules Verne Trophy, but Sanderson says that his old colleague was never going to be on the race boat – he has a more technical role with the team, setting up instrumentation, data analysis, etc.

Part of the objective here in Nice, is also to have learned from Auckland. After the Louis Vuitton event in February, so TeamOrigin’s Sailing Team Manager, Steve Erickson, the 1984 Star gold medallist and AC veteran (ex Golden Gate Challenge, Il Moro, Team Dennis Conner and Prada since 2000) created a list of their strengths and weaknesses from that regatta, which the British team are now addressing for Nice.

“We have tried to take that document and be better. We don’t have too many excuses this time. We shall see,” concludes Moose.