Goodbye Volvo Ocean 60?

Volvo Ocean Race's head honcho tells Andy Rice about his plans for the next race in three years' time

While little has been set in stone for the next Volvo Ocean Race in autumn 2005, we can be pretty sure that we have seen the last of the Volvo Ocean 60. madforsailing spoke to the race's chief executive, Helge Alten (above), just after he had spent a busy day in Gothenburg explaining the Swedish car firm's plans for the second edition of the round the world race.

With Alten due to retire on 1 December this year, he will be passing on the reins to a new chief executive. For his part, Alten is looking forward to "going sailing", although he has been asked to stay on as a consultant for the next race.

Whilst Alten will constitute only one member of the board that eventually decides the details of the next race next Spring, he is clearly against allowing the illbruck scenario to take place again. "The general consensus is that we should make the race more affordable, and set it up so that it doesn't pay to come in earlier into the game," he told madforsailing. "We want to avoid the situation where one team buys two boats from the previous race and spends three full years training as a build-up to the next race. We want to make it possible to launch a new boat on a fairly low-entry ticket."

So that being the case, it looks as though the Volvo Ocean 60 is on its way out. Alten more or less confirmed this. "If you want to keep the VO60 it has to be cheaper to run," he said. "You could have just 10 crew, and identical keel designs for instance, but what you are doing is downgrading the current VO60, and 'downgrading' is not a word I think we should be associating with the race. It's not development. The present design will be 15 years old soon. Downgrading says it is not the Formula One of ocean racing, and that is what we want to be, not the touring car championships of sailing."

But according to Alten, and indeed a number of the skippers, the choice of boat is perhaps one of the least important considerations. "There is a whole range of things to look at:
"There is the length of the race - should it be six instead of nine months, for instance?
Should we limit the number of stopovers, to help reduce logistics costs?
Then there is the length of each stopover.
Then there are boat, crew and sail considerations. Should we set up the boats to sail with six or eight crew instead of 12, and should we halve the number of sails allowed?
How much should the hull weigh? At the moment we have an all-up weight which means you want to try to reduce hull weight to a minimum and put as much as possible into the keel."

Part of the problem for Volvo is that they are operating in a much busier environment than the Whitbread Race had to contend with 20 or even just 10 years ago. There is the Vendee Globe, the Around Alone, and more recently the Antarctica Cup and Bruno Peyron's new Race format revealed exclusively by madforsailing just last week.

Alten doesn't see this crowded market place as an issue, in fact he makes a good case for seeing some advantages to the situation. "I don't think it really influences us. I think journalists want to make it an issue, but we don't see it as such. You can say there is only one cake of a limited size, and it is a matter of how much of that cake Volvo gets, or you can look at expanding the size of the cake, by drawing in sponsorship into sailing that has usually gone to other sports.

"If you compare the Volvo Ocean Race with the last Whitbread Race in 97-98, then we have put in about twice as much money into the event compared with the race sponsor last time, and although the number of entries is down, the amount of funding those eight teams have put in as around 40 to 50 per cent greater than last time."

Cost is public enemy number one, says Helge Alten on page 2 below...