Ken Read interview

madforsailing spoke to Kenny Read, the man on the helm of Dennis Conner's Stars & Stripes

While the longevity of Conner's family approach and the formidable experience within his team is supremely impressive, it could also be argued that this might make it less vital, stale even, compared to the newly formed mega-teams such as Alinghi, Oracle and OneWorld.

Read firmly refutes this: "I don't think we're lacking for fresh ideas, especially when you hire guys like Reichel Pugh, who right now it could be argued are making the fastest monohulls in the world on the racing scene. There's another design team involved with the mast and another for the sails, yet another team for our foils - I don't think there is any possibility of us being stagnant. The money is being spent on trying to have the best boat available and I don't think I'm warped yet although I'm probably getting there!

"The flip side from a management standpoint is how much do you put into experience? Why spend $1 million dollars on this when we proved 20 years ago it didn't work. That's why I think we can get away with a smaller budget than most because Dennis and Billy are the first to admit 'we've made that mistake before. We don't have to spend the money on that.' So it is a fine line between experience versus new ideas and hopefully we're doing it right."

While the two new Team Dennis Conner boats USA 66 and 77 were both largely the product of the Reichel Pugh office in San Diego, they came to life on the other side of the States under the watchful eye of Tommy Rich at New England Boatworks in Newport, RI. Once again Rich has worked with Conner for years from the days when he used to build aluminium 12 metres for him. Aside from the America's Cup boats New England Boatworks also built Conner's two Whitbread Round the World Race boats Winston and Toshiba. "As I said before Dennis is a pretty loyal guy and Tommy has done a great job for him in the past and he feels comfortable," explains Read.

Their first boat this time round, USA-66, was christened in January at the New York Yacht Club in New York, this was followed by the second boat USA-77 which was launched in May at the team's training base in Long Beach, CA.

While most AC teams were busy acclimatising to the conditions in New Zealand's Hauraki Gulf, Team Dennis Conner remained entrenched in Long Beach. Read says their reasons for staying in California were due to a simple lack of time on the water. "One of the downfalls of the programme, was lack of time, not continuing from the end of the last race in 2000. The best case scenario of course is to just continue and start building your team then, But unfortunately we had to raise the money and didn't have a billionaire just writing a cheque. So we knew that when we got things going, time on the water was critical, so to go to Auckland when winter is starting, when we could stay in a place which is testing heaven, like Long Beach, it became pretty simple. We just wanted time on the water and Long Beach didn't let us down."

In part two of this interview tomorrow Ken Read talks us through 'the sinking' and how he holds down his day job

USA 66 and USA 77 training off Long Beach