Life after Oracle

The Daily Sail catches up with one of its subscribers - world match racing champion and former Oracle helm Peter Holmberg

Peter Holmberg had a bumpy ride through this America's Cup. Originally taken on by John Cutler to join Larry Ellison's Oracle Racing team as a secondary afterguard when it was led by Chris Dickson, he moved on through the Paul Cayard era, before being launched into the helmsman's spot.

Then - wham - after a disappointing first round robin and after being nailed by Prada in the first race of second round robins, Holmberg found himself ousted with the return of New Zealand's 'enfante terrible'. Initially off the boat, Holmberg, was soon back on board sharing the wheel with Dickson.

"It was certainly volatile." Holmberg admits, cautiously using a word The Daily Sail has put in his mouth. "There were some changes. I do remain positive. There were some hard times, but I was happy and fortunate how it came down. But you’d have to agree that a lot of course changes and leadership changes made it very tricky for the team to unify and gell."

One of the most impressive aspects of the Oracle BMW Racing campaign was how off the pace they looked in the preliminary rounds and yet how they came so much closer to winning the challenger series than their 5-1 defeat to the hands of Alinghi in the finals would suggest.

Holmberg reveals an unexpected detail about why they got off to such a slow start - their boat was moded strongly towards the upper end of the wind range but remarkably the race committee's idea of the upper limit was lower than they felt it to be.

"To be honest that was a lot lower than anticipated," Holmberg admits. "We didn't get the expected conditions. To be precise and one thing the challengers didn’t realise when we defined these great wind limits, is we define a time of day by Greenwich Mean Time, but who measures this wind? There is no governing body of wind measurement. You buy a B&G – well it’s B&G. Whoever the race committee chose to buy their instruments from – that’s the weather reading we got."

While nuclear clocks can be used to check the time accurate to a fraction of a second Holmberg maintains that at the upper end of the prescribed 7-19 knot wind range, the race committee's instruments were out by as much as 2-3 knots. "You get ten people in a room and there are 10 different 7-19s. So - calibrate your instruments. How do you calibrate your instruments? There is no well defined body to measure that. As a result the conditions of racing were a lot lower than we expected."

Oracle had their wind instruments calibrated in a wind tunnel. "It happened to be very critical. If you look at the NMEA data and look at the wind speeds, there were several days that were blown out, that were right there on the cusp and if they had been our instruments they would have been raceable."

Holmberg says that it was a display of the quality of their team that they were able to pull back from this situation and remode their boat so effectively. "I think it was a good credit to the design team and to the sailors, that we were able to continually develop our boat to the conditions. I think this is one of the fundamental things in these campaigns as you’ve seen demonstrated by the other teams, continually progress their design and program along.

"I would say Farr and his design team did do an awesome job. We put some horsepower behind those guys, with supercomputers and resources and people so you saw the product of a lot of research and development. Then there were some great sailors on that team. Maybe because the leadership changed there was no precise direction the boat was heading so when it did come out and it wasn't at target, this group of individuals were able to change modes."

Predictably with computer supremo Ellison backing them along with BMW Racing and the might of the German car manufacturer's Formula One technology, they had some incredible toys to play with.

This included a Hewlett Packard supercomputer."The biggest thing for us was using all the horsepower of this computer to gather information from all of our testing and utilise it to the benefit of the sailors and the designers," says Holmberg. "So we logged readings throughout the boat and sensors, loads, angles, etc. and built this tremendous database, and then had the operators to make it all user friendly for us so that sailors could come in and pull up the database and look at sail shots for the last year and trap positions and rudder angles and heel angles."

Coolest of their technology was unquestionably their TAG Heuer sunglasses with built-in heads up display. "That came about because of our BMW deal. It was good to see, because they got quite late and they were very keen to help us technologically and not just financially. I was sitting with one of the guys from BMW one night at table and I asked about these heads up displays I know the race car drivers use. Sure enough this guy was involved and we pursued it and we ended up taking some of our TAG Heuer glasses and he adapted a heads up display to it.

"The most it helped was the strategists and tacticians, so that they could have their heads out of the boat looking for the wind and they could put up four data streams on their glasses, so you could have wind speed and direction, true wind angle and apparent wind angle. So it was great for them to have their head out of the boats and have true wind direction so that if they saw a puff coming, they wouldn’t have to look somewhere else they could see it."

At the moment Ellison has said he will carry on but the permanence with which the Oracle base is being deconstructed does not suggest this. Holmberg believes the Ellison is likely to go it again but will only make the call after the outcome of the Cup is known. "I believe there’d have to be a big reason for him not to do it again."

Personally Holmberg would very much like to get back into another America's Cup campaign, but plans to take it easy for a bit first. "My plans are to sit back and digest everything I’ve learned from this campaign. It was a great experience which I believe I have learned a lot from. I would be keen to put that to use in the next campaign, so I am very interested in doing another one. The match race game – that is my forte. I love working with sailors and taking the sailing game to a higher level."

It is likely that he will return to the Swedish Match Tour - which he won last year with an event to spare, but this will not be until the summer and possibly until he knows what his next Cup plans are.

Of the outcome of the America's Cup Holmberg said he is surprised having banked on Team New Zealand. "It is obviously the toughest thing in the world to predict, because there are such big unknowns – the challenge group developing their boat at speed and the challenger never lining up until the day. But on paper I had figured that Team New Zealand would have a faster boat. And a faster boat I felt would enable them to win.

"If they didn't have a faster boat then the team that Russell Coutts has going right now is incredibly strong and is getting so much out of their boat. They have a special boat but it is a special team too. Someone else wouldn't be winning with that boat. It is led by the crew. The team developed that boat to where it is now."

So what is special about SUI64? "It’s got height - it’s strongest point that I’ve seen different from everybody is the ability to sail high angles," maintains Holmberg. "It’s got great acceleration. I think their sail programme is incredibly strong. Their boat looks very well balanced which gives Russell the ability to do a lot with the boat – tack, gybe manoeuvre, accelerate. So I’m very impressed that the challenger group did develop their designs that well that there doesn’t appear to be much of speed difference between them and New Zealand."

Holmberg says that an equalisation of boat speed between the defender and the challenges was to be expected following the splitting up of the 2000 Team New Zealand team. This caused a lot of Team New Zealand know-how to be spread around the different campaigns. Yet this argument would only hold water if NZL82 was similar to NZL60 - which is clearly is not, the Kiwi design team apparently having gone back to basics to design a boat around the long keel and the hula.

"I think all of us assumed that with the people they had there they were going to do very smart steps and not lose the base they had. And as long as they did controlled tests with smart people involved to come up with something so different, a lot of us just assumed, well Jesus if that group of guys went in that direction from that starting point, they must have had some breakthroughs."

Holmberg believes that Barker's team may have positive mental attitude issues. "Their body language does show a team that is not very confident in winning. So they need to break out of that. If that means seeing a sports psychologist they should be too macho to not do it because it starts with believing you can win."

Having been on the Swedish Match Tour for a long time he knows Barker is more than capable of beating Coutts, although the America's Cup while still match racing, is a rather different affair. "There is all the complications of representating your country, and defending and expectations, etcetera, that they need to get beyond," Holmberg says of the Team New Zealand sailing team. "It is possible they could turn it around – but I’m not betting on that happening."

Personally Holmberg is in two minds about the Cup potentially coming to Europe. "I have mixed emotions there. Personally I love New Zealand. I think the sport gets treated so well here, it is a joy to do the campaign here. The industry is set up for it. The cost is cheaper, etc.

"Having said that I think it would be the best thing for the sport, if the Cup went to Europe. It will take sailing into the main stay. It would give it lots of exposure. The public will get involved. It would be good for the event that if sponsors can get the return they need then the sport can get closer to some of the other professional sports that are able to do it through sponsorship.

In terms of changes he'd like to see made to the event, there are few to the boat, many to the event.
"The boats are good. I don’t think they need to change much there. There are 80 of these boats in the world and there are still big steps being made. The nationality rule needs to be either dropped or tightened. It is grey and it only hurts the sport.

"The racing format needs to be changed. They need to sit down and take the good aspects of this latest format and keep some of those. What I would try to achieve - allowing the strong teams to get stronger was the goal of our current format. Allowing the lower group to still have a change to come forward was a goal. Having it last for 3-4 months, with such big breaks - we need to sort that better.

"You could stagger it, do your preliminary round and break it into two groups, then when the A teams are having their quarterfinals, the B teams have their two weeks down and then the B teams have their quarter finals.

"The wind limits need to be opened up so that racing takes place more often. I would like to see the cycles of the Cup get shortened – dramatically.

He would also like to the America's Cup class be turned into more of a rolling Formula 1 style affair, perhaps with the Cup itself held every two years, "so that teams are not just one time teams. I’d love to see our sport achieve what football and everything else does where a Prada or an Oracle establish a team that runs. And maybe like in Formula 1 – you still run your 2000 and keep upgrading it and upgrading it and it is only when there is a major change that you introduce a new design – that would be so doable."

Holmberg, like many here in Auckland, believes that in Ernesto Bertarelli and Russell Coutts, the Cup has two individuals not afraid of making significant changes to the event.

To read about Peter Holmberg's background see page 2...