Top contender

We look at Torbjorn Tornqvist's Artemis campaign and its latest challenge - the America's Cup

The Louis Vuitton Trophy regattas - to date held in Auckland and Nice and with four regattas planned for 2010 - are providing an opportunity for potential challengers for the 34th America’s Cup to emerge from the closet.

One of the surprises among these has been Torbjorn Tornqvist’s Artemis team. Tornqvist, a Geneva-based Swede, who’s company Gunvor is Russia’s biggest oil exporter, only got into competitive big boat racing in 2004 with his Swan 601. Just three years later Tornqvist moved into the TP52 class and under the tutelage of one Russell Coutts, in his first year, incredibly, helmed his Artemis to victory on the Audi MedCup. He has continued to campaign his TP52 over the last two seasons squeaking on to the Audi MedCup podium this year, just one point ahead of Alberto Roemmers’ Matador. The 2009 season has also seen him join Coutts’ RC44 class.

A feature of both these campaigns has been that Tornqvist, an avid sportsman, gets to helm. However this will not be the case with his newly launched campaign on the Louis Vuitton Trophy series. "I’m sure no one will allow me to steer this boat!" Tornqvist told thedailysail down in Nice. "I enjoy sailing and the TP52 and the RC44 are great classes to sail in and take part in. This I do for different reasons - to see if we can bring it to another level. I am like a sponsor of this."

As to why he is doing this, Tornqvist says: "It has been in the back of my head for some time and with this Louis Vuitton Cup it is a good thing to get started in this class."

Whether this is indeed the penultimate step before embarking on a fully-fledged America’s Cup campaign, Tornqvist says he obviously wants to wait and see what transpires for the 34th America’s Cup once the Deed of Gift multihull match is over and the subsequent legal wranglings have subsided. However the America's Cup does seem to be his aim. "Obviously we don’t know what form it will take but we hope it will come back to some form of normality so this is the idea to see if we can bring the team to this level and give it a shot."



The Artemis Cup team afterguard sees sailing legend Paul Cayard take the skipper’s spot, but unusually he is not steering and in fact spent much of the Louis Vuitton Trophy regatta windspotting at the top of the mast (causing some grumblings from the grinders). Behind the wheel is Terry Hutchinson, winner of the 2008 Audi MedCup on Quantum Racing, who has made the move from Emirates Team New Zealand with Kevin Hall, Artemis’ new navigator. They are joined by Morgan Larson as tactician.

Interestingly this all-American afterguard sailed together with Cayard on AmericaOne for the 2000 America’s Cup in New Zealand, albeit all then holding the role of trimmers.
The band getting back together doesn’t seem to have been entirely coincidental as Terry Hutchinson explains: "In the past year and a half I have talked to Paul [Cayard] a lot about wanting to sail together and join forces."

We point out that in the TeamOrigin afterguard, Ben Ainslie has gathered his Olympic chums around him - people he trusts, respects and has known for years. Is the same happening here? "We are definitely sailing with people we want to sail with,” says Hutchinson. "When the team was established there’s so many good people out there, but if you have a team of individuals it is not really a team. So when Beach [Team Manager, Jared Henderson] and I and Paul discussed the team. we wanted to have people we knew were going to be really really good in their roles, but who we also wanted to have on board, because when you carve up the first race against Synergy you want to be able to bounce back and have a good race against All4One."

Clearly much thought has gone into the team structure, based on Cayard’s 25 years of experience with different Cup teams from the years with Stars & Stripes and il Moro de Venezia, to being with the Spanish in 2007, as well as that of his seasoned colleagues.

For example Hutchinson says that from the outset he, rather than Cayard, was going to helm. This is of the key decisions in any AC sailing team - whether the helmsman and skipper are one and the same person. In this case they have chosen to split the roles. As Jared Henderson explains: "Terry is helmsman and Paul is skipper. Terry is on the water and Paul takes a lot of the interviews and takes the heat off Terry so he can concentrate on the sailing." Typically on the boat things happen so fast that the helmsman has to be skipper.

Further forward on the boat they have the highly experienced Robbie Naismith, Morgan Trubovich and Marco Constant trimming. James Spithill’s long term bowman Andy Fethers is on the bow with former Ericsson 4 crewman Phil Jameson. The middle of the boat is largely Kiwi with David Brook on the mast, scary large Craig Monk and Ian Baker grinding along with American Mark Newbrook and Swede Magnus Augustson. Interestingly Jared Henderson is in the pit - in the sailing crew as well as managing the team, perhaps a leaf taken out of Grant Dalton’s book. Sean Clarkson is on traveller and Rodney Daniel does runner/pit assist. Many of this line-up also sail on either the Artemis RC44 or the TP52 or both.

This will be Hutchinson’s fourth Cup campaign following America One, his tactician’s role with Stars & Stripes in 2003 and then Emirates Team NZ. The Louis Vuitton Trophy campaign with Artemis was only given the green light four months ago and Hutchinson says he was approached about his role in August at the Audi MedCup regatta in Portimao.

For 2010 they will again compete in the Louis Vuitton Trophy regatta while Tornqvist will continue to steer his RC44 and TP52 and Hutchinson will carry on as helmsman and skipper of the Quantum Racing TP. In 2010 Hutchinson say the Artemis Cup campaign will be his main priority along with Quantum Racing's third season on the Audi MedCup.
The advantage of having what is now a fleet of boats to choose from is that they have good practice opportunities and Hutchinson says they are planning on carrying out some training on two RC44s over the winter in Dubai – for Katusha, the RC44 Cayard skippers is conveniently owned by Torbjorn Tornqvist’s Russian business partner at Guvnor.

We ask why they are not getting a V5 boat to train on for the Louis Vuitton Trophy regatta, for there is a legion of difference between both RC44s and TP52s and the 17 man effort necessary to get a Version 5 AC boat around the race course. Henderson points out that the indications are that the new generation Cup boats - whatever they might end up being, AC90 and AC33 or something similar – is likely to be a more modern generation monohull, more akin to the RC44/TP52 style.

"Potentially the Ameica’s Cup is not going to be in a Version 5 type boat. It will be in a larger TP52-type arrangement I think. And a lot of the crew have done a lot of V5 sailing as well. We did look at it before Nice, but we were pretty much straight from the TP52 Worlds and Terry came from the Melges 24 Worlds."

Russell Coutts was involved in the Artemis campaign early on, both with the Swan 601 and then the TP52 - for the 2008 Audi MedCup season, the Artemis and BMW Oracle Racing TP52s were Reichel-Pugh sisterships and the boats shared BMW Oracle Racing crew, until the BMW Oracle Racing team bailed when their trimaran was launched.



According to Jared Henderson, Coutts is no longer involved with the campaign. “Obviously Russell has got plenty on with other stuff and Paul has been great.”

Following two Cups with Team New Zealand in 2000 and 2003, Henderson himself was part of BMW Oracle Racing up until half way through 2007 when he left to join Artemis full time, project managing the build of the TP52s before being promoted to Team Manager.

With such a lineage, when the 34th America’s Cup comes to pass, we can expect the Artemis team to be one of the strongest participants.

More photos on the following pages...