No TP52 this year for Perc

Iain Percy and Andrew Simpson on their Star campaign and what they had hoped to achieve on the Audi MedCup

Possibly it is best for their Olympic aspirations, but Star Gold medallists Iain Percy and Andrew Simpson have sadly been unable to raise the funds to fulfil their cunning plan for 2011 of campaigning the TeamOrigin TP52 on the Audi MedCup, as we discovered on a pleasant cruise to Cowes and back with them courtesy of their footwear sponsor Clarks Sport (more about this here).

“We didn’t announce anything, because it was so embryonic, but myself and Andrew really enjoyed the TP52 last year and thought it was a great circuit,” admits Percy. “We went through our Star program this year and it happened to have breaks exactly where the [Audi MedCup] regattas were and we thought it would be an opportunity to get some of the guys who were involved in TeamOrigin out again because it was quite a tough decision for them [Sir Keith Mills pulling the plug on his AC campaign]. But unfortunately we weren’t able to raise the money. It is a pretty expensive class and to do it with a commercial element to it is quite difficult. It was a shame.”

Percy says they gave themselves a deadline of a couple of weeks ago to raise around £1.2 million for the campaign and didn’t want to push it further and risk getting involved with something “half-cocked”.

Simpson adds that while they wanted to bring back several of the TeamOrigin crew they sailed with last year, another objective of the campaign had been to harness the untapped talents of some more of their ex-British Olympic sailor compadres.

“Ben, Iain and myself have been lucky enough to be involved in the America’s Cup in the past, but there doesn’t seem to be any transition into big boat racing from anyone in the UK. One of our objectives of the program was to get the Pippa Wilsons, Joe Glanfields and people who have been to the Olympics and succeeded in that and know the mindset of how to achieve and to take that to the America’s Cup level.”

The ideal would be to copy the Emirates Team New Zealand model where the most talented young Kiwi sailors get support from the America’s Cup team, as best demonstrated recently by Adam Minoprio who wore the black shirt when campaigning on the World Match Racing Tour and has since graduated up to the Camper Volvo Ocean Race campaign, the Kiwi Cup team are running. Along the way he has been able to tap into the Kiwi Cup team’s now formidable knowledge base.

As Percy puts it: “At Team New Zealand there is this production line of sailors coming through, arguably sailors who didn’t prove to have any more talent at Olympic or small boat level than those we have in the UK. But we aren’t very good at having systems or an organisation like Team New Zealand that has been bringing them through. So the concept, and I know that Ben [Ainslie] shares it, is to try and use the talented people that we have in the UK, to use the knowledge base by getting people who learn and suck the knowledge from the more experienced guys - that is the only way it can really work.”

While Britain has one of the top Olympic sailing programs, Simpson reckons that the UK is perhaps 20-25 years behind New Zealand when it comes to its best small boat sailors making the transition into big boats and development of the 'knowledge base'. Equally it could be argued that such sailors need to grunt up and make their own opportunities in the big boat world just like everyone else. But unquestionably having an entity where knowledge could be pooled, where our Simon Daubney and Warwick Fleury equivalents, the Paul Standbridges and Neal McDonalds, could pass their experience on to the next generation, would be a huge bonus to UK sailing - something surely the RYA and even the BMIF, should take a hand in addressing.

Percy continues: “I was very lucky in 2000 with the Farr 40 here that I was given an opportunity to start to learn a little about big boats and get into that side of it. Then you become a safe pair of hands, you aren’t going to lose your finger in a winch and all those little stupid things. To be honest - a lot of our top Olympic sailors haven’t loaded a winch before in their life and it will be that which catches them out – nothing about their talent and drive.”

Another downside of our dynamic duo not campaigning the TP52 this year is that they won’t get to see how the numerous modifications made to their Juan K-designed boat over the winter will stand up against the rest of the Audi MedCup fleet. All existing TP52s competing in the Med this year have had to make stage 2 of the class’ turboing process, involving in particular a significant increase in their stability via a keel change. However the former TeamOrigin TP52 has had more mods than most to make up for the holes in her performance last year.

As Percy describes it: “It probably struggled, downwind in planing conditions and marginal surfing was where we needed a pick-up. Juan had some good ideas on that and that would have been improved this year. The strengths were flat wind in up to 11 knots.”

Simpson adds: “The performance upwind was fantastic and I’m pretty sure we could have replicated that through a lot more of the wind range with all the modifications done.”

The boat has a new bow which is now fuller and deeper. This will add length improving performance below planing speed and getting up to planning speed, which is imperative, stresssd Simpson.

As part of the work being carried out at Green Marine in Lymington, there is alarmingly a lot of refairing being carried out to get the boat back to the design’s original lines. As Simpson states: “It was a long way from design shape and very asymmetric in hull form. When we turned the boat upside down and looked at it there were up to 7-8mm bumps in the boat at points where you would be very dissatisfied. If you had that in a Star you probably wouldn’t bother going out.”

They have also updated the Southern Spars rig which Simpson reckons will now be quicker in anything over 9 knots. Last year Percy says their rig was very hard to tune. “You could get there, but then the wind would change by two knots and it would be out again. So we worked on that side of it, speced it up in terms of the rigging and in the lamination as well.”

While the boat won’t be competing on the Audi MedCup, Charles Dunstone and the Rio crew will be campaigning it in the UK under IRC. As Percy states: “We’ll see it at the IRC Nationals. Hopefully it can win that, otherwise we really will have done badly!”

They will continue to help out with the technical development of the boat but aren’t planning on being part of the sailing team this year.

Stars in their eyes

As we stated at the start of this article, the Percy/Simpson Audi MedCup campaign going pear-shaped was a positive in that it will allow them to focus more on their campaign to defend their Star Olympic Gold at London 2012.

Percy says that had it gone ahead they might have lost some of their ‘reflection time’. “You never know how much value you can place on that. We would never have had a day off! And whether maybe you get burned out a little bit - that was a worry of mine, for sure. Now we are going to have time to think. I must say over this winter period it has often been those weeks away that you come up with the best ideas.”

Since winning the Worlds more than a year ago, Percy says there have been some developments in the Star class with the increased take-up of the P Star, developed prior to the Beijing Games by German sailor Marc Pickel with CFD work carried out at Kiel University and funding originally from Michael Illbruck. Building and marketing of this has since been shifted to the USA.

“They have taken volume out the back and gone a bit quicker downwind. It is what generally the class has gone towards,” says Simpson – neither want to give too much (or indeed anything) away about their own Star development plans, but clearly they view the P Star in high regard.

Percy and Simpson are concentrating on their equipment for London 2012 but have learned a great deal from the mistakes they made in this aspect of their campaign leading up to Beijing (not that the end result was too bad) where they committed to a new boat and got caught up in going down a route that Andrew Simpson admits “didn’t really work at first and we had to go backwards from there. It was too rushed. It was too late. But long term it has helped our understanding hugely but at the time it was quite painful and frustrating.”

This time their technical development in the Star started from the beginning of 2009, most or less on their return from China, substantially earlier than last time.

Percy reckons that their success in Weymouth next year will be 80% down to them and 20% to their equipment, however when it comes to their personal development he believes that can be achieved in a finite number of months... “whatever that is... We tried to push it into about four months last time! That was too little - we still had a lot of improving to do. Hopefully this time we are going to have at least a year where we can focus on ourselves.”

Thus in 2011 they are embarking on a lot of sailing on the Olympic circuit, including of course Skandia Sail for Gold and the test event in Weymouth, culminating this year in the ISAF Worlds in Perth come December. Their program kicks off with the Trofeo Princess Sofia in Palma next month.

As to their team, Percy and Simpson are sticking with a similar line-up, in particular ‘the Juans’, designer Juan Kouyoumdjian (although he is busy with Artemis AC72 catamarans and three Volvo campaigns) and North Sails Argentina’s Juan Garay, their sail designer (although their sails are constructed by North UK). Adam May is also involved with their technical development and performance analysis as is the RYA posse of Peter Bentley, Simon Briscoe and Owen Modral.

Meanwhile Percy is off St Petersburg for the ISAF Mid-Year Meetings in May to state the case for the Star. But we won’t get him started on that...