iShares Cup - form guide

Our look at the teams for this year and the boats they are sailing

More boats, more America’s Cup sailors, more Olympic medallists, more round the world sailors - the big question is: which teams are going to gain the top spots in the 2008 iShares Cup?

Going into the season it is hard to tell. There are many new teams and generally throughout the fleet there has been a redistribution of crew. And yet there are no obviously weak teams - in fact the majority are dripping with talent. This year there are four new boats, made entirely by Marstom (previously some parts were sub-contracted out) - will this make a difference?

While there are many returning teams such as that of 2007 iShares Cup champion Rob Greenhalgh or Randy Smyth’s Tommy Hilfiger or Shirley Robertson’s JPMorgan Asset Management team, half of the teams are new, but these include some heavy hitters. We suspect that the old hands will show the way in the early part of the series but as the season progresses the new teams will rapidly learn about mastering the lively 40ft catamarans and how to be competitive on the iShares Cup’s uniquely short courses and its crash and burn style racing.



About the only thing that is certain is that the season starts with a surefire favourite. This is Rob Greenhalgh and his squad of fellow members of the TeamOrigin British America’s Cup team. Greenhalgh's credentials as a former International 14 and 18ft skiff world champion, along with his having sailed around the world as part of the winning ABN AMRO One crew make him well suited to fast boats and the Hamble-based sailor seems to have made the transition to two hulls seamlessly. Last season the Greenhalgh steered Team Basilica utterly dominated the iShares Cup, winning all four events in Munich, Marseille, Cowes and Amsterdam. This year’s his team has changed, but if anything has grown stronger - his highly experienced brother Peter remains, but joining the team are hard-as-nails French round the world, America’s Cup and ORMA 60 sailor Julien Cressant and AC bowman/surfer dude Matt Cornwall. TeamOrigin are sailing Conrad Humphries' Motorola boat from last season.

For JPMorgan Asset Management skipper Shirley Robertson, the transition from the Yngling to an Extreme 40 is, in car terms, like moving from a Lada to a Lamborghini. Her best result last year was a third in Cowes, but she is certain to have upped her game since. Loyal crewmen Fraser Brown and Nick Hutton remain with her this season, but Freddie Carr has jumped ship to race with the new Oman Sail team. He is replaced by America’s Cup sailor and tactician Chris Main. The team this year are sailing a new boat.



Last year Austrian Andreas Hagara, brother of the Sydney and Athens Tornado Gold medallist Roman, and himself a Tornado World Champion in 1987, stood in for Carolyn Brouwer as skipper of the Holmatro Extreme 40 in the first two regattas, finishing third on both occasions. With Brouwer this year committed to the Olympic Games in China (along with many other top Tornado sailors who competed in the iShares Cup last year), Hagara is now full time skipper and will be hoping to at least repeat his 2007 success. But while last year Hagara was with cat sailing veterans Greg Homann and Andy Meiklejohn, this year his crew line-up is all new and includes double Round Texel winner and F18 European champion Mischa Heemskerk. Their boat was new last year.

Holmatro is one of three boats that have been involved in the Extreme 40 circuit since its inception in 2005. The other two returning this year are Volvo Ocean Race and Tommy Hilfiger.

While last year the Volvo Ocean Race Extreme 40 was manned by local teams in each country the iShares Cup visited, this year it is being skippered for the whole season by the circuit’s creator Herbert Dercksen, himself an Olympic Tornado sailor and holder of three world championship titles in small cats. Dercksen will be sailing with a Dutch crew of former Volvo Ocean Race sailors, including Simeon Tienpont and Gerd-Jan Poortman who were on the youth entry ABN AMRO Two in the last round the world race and Arend van Bergelijk who competed on board Brunel Synergy in 1997-8. They are all top sailors, but perhaps lacking catamaran experience compared to their rivals.

2008 marks the return to Extreme 40 racing of American Randy Smyth, who will once again take the helm of Tommy Hilfiger, having been victorious in the class during its first season. Smyth is a legend among catamaran sailing circles having won an impressive 58 national and international titles, plus a silver medal in the Tornado at the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles. Smyth competed in the last event of the 2007 circuit and will take over the helm from last year’s skipper Stan Schreyer, who is once again racing on board, as are Johnathan Farrar and Dutch sailor Mark van Gelderen. Smyth has certainly lost none of his verve as a competitive cat sailor and among all the Extreme 40 teams Tommy Hilfiger’s crew has been the most consistent throughout the seasons. Having finished fifth at last season’s events, we wait to see if Smyth can work his magic to improve their performance. However they are not competing in Lugano.

As part of BT Team Ellen, America’s Cup and round the world sailor Nick Moloney returns once again but with a new crew representing the UK telecom giant. Last year Moloney sailed with some of the world’s leading Tornado sailors including Aussie World Championships Darren Bundock and Glenn Ashby and the Team GBR man in the catamaran at the Sydney games, Hugh Styles. With this line-up they podiumed at all but one of the iShares Cup regattas. This year Moloney has British Olympic Tornado sailor Andrew Walsh steering with his crew Ed Barney, while man power and grunt will be provided by ‘big’ Steve Mitchell, Iain Percy’s Star crew from the Athens Olympics - a strong line-up certainly, but on paper at least not with same the profound catamaran sailing talent they had last year. They are in the same boat they had last year.



Of the new teams, all eyes will of course be on Alinghi. With the 33rd America’s Cup taking place in multihulls next year, so the Swiss defenders are attempting to get in the maximum amount of race practice in these boats and are committed to competing in the whole iShares Cup series this year. American Ed Baird, their winning helmsman from the 32nd America’s Cup, will be taking the tiller of their Extreme 40 sailing alongside trimmer Lorenzo Mazza, versatile round the world and Cup sailor Rodney Ardern and bowman Pieter van Nieuwenhuyzen. In fact Ardern has developed a back injury for Lugano and Craig Satterthwaite has flown in to take his place on mainsheet. While the team is new to catamarans they have been training daily now for months on their Extreme 40 from the team’s America’s Cup HQ in Valencia. How they take to the ultra-short course racing of the iShares Cup remains to be seen. They also hold the advantage of sailing the former Team Basilica, last year's winning machine.

A complete unknown this year will be Team Aqua. To date they have only reared their head on board Dubai-based Chris Bake’s boat of the same name on the RC44 one design circuit, where they won the Championship last lear. Cameron Appleton, Team Aqua’s RC44 helm and former Team New Zealand B-boat driver from 2003, will be skipper (when he is not competing on the RC44 circuit - thus he is no sailing in Lugano) but Alister Richardson will steer. A former Olympic 49er sailor, Richardson has past experience in the class having helmed Team Basilica in 2006. The Team Aqua crew will be another former Basilica crewman Jonathon Taylor and two time America’s Cup sailor Jim Turner, joined by Dan Johnson, Rob Greenhalgh's International 14 and 18ft skiff crewman. They have a new boat for 2008.



Another new team with familiar faces on board is Oman Sail. While this will be skippered by Pete Cumming, helmsman will be 49er bronze medallist from Athens, Chris Draper. They will be joined by Team GBR’s Athens representative in the Tornado, Mark Bulkeley and America’s Cup crewman David Carr. While this is the starting line-up, over the course of the season Omani sailors will be invited to join the team as part of an initiative to develop the Middle Eastern republic’s standing as a sailing nation. They are sailing the original Holmatro boat, the first Extreme 40 ever to be built.

Having jumped ship from the BT boat, British Olympic Tornado sailor Hugh Styles is this year helming the new entry of circuit sponsor iShares. The crew line-up is likely to be more flexible than most with local sailors coming on board as the circuit moves across Europe. The core crew including Dutch sailor Gerhard Van Geest, a former Nacra World Chamiion and Adam Piggot, a 19 year old British Tornado sailor. With the crew changing from regatta to regatta, the iShares crew is likely to lack the consistency of some of the other more regular teams. Their boat is new.

So thedailysail.com’s top three for the season are TeamOrigin, Alinghi with the third spot being harder to choose - Team Aqua or Oman Sail we suspect.

Going legit

This year, for the first time, the Extreme 40s are being measured, this process being carried out by Herbert Dercksen's father Vim. All the boats are now within 1kg, with lead correctors attached visibly to the main crossbeam. Without the correctors Dercksen senior says there is 38kg of variation between the boats. Interestingly the original Holmatro remains the lightest of these 1,400kg boats... The boats have been weighed without their rigs but with rudders, sheets and the boom. The mast, sails and daggerboards have been measured separately. The daggerboards are weight corrected independently from the rest of the boat, but the variation here has been around 3kg says Dercksen. Over the course of two seasons the rules allow the teams to have three suits of sails however there is some variation between the weight of sails according to if they are painted or not. This weight difference is built into the overall weight correction for the boats.

So aside from the new boats being a bit stiffer, there should be minimal variation between boats. In fact this is relatively immaterial according to Alinghi helm Ed Baird - the biggest variation between the boats is indeed down to how they are sailed and whether or not you find the puff. Besides here in Lugano there is no wind, so it will be something of a lottery. And now its raining too....