Introducing the all new Volvo Ocean Race

James Boyd speaks to Race of Race Operations Andy Hindley about the announcement we have all been waiting for

At a gala soiree in Auckland this evening, the long awaited details of the Volvo Ocean Race 2005-6 were announced.

It should be pointed out that at this stage the new rules are in outline form and Glenn Bourke, CEO of the Volvo Ocean Race says he doesn't expect the rules to be totally finalised until the end of the year.


The boat

The new Volvo Ocean 70 is very similar to an Open 60, but 10ft longer. The performance of the new boat will be a dramatic improvement upon the Volvo Ocean 60 and Glenn Bourke, Andy Hindley and the team at Volvo Ocean Race HQ have been keen that their new beast, even on paper, will get potential entrants' adrenalin pumping - in this The Daily Sail feel they have certainly succeeded.

"The hull of the boat we are going to leave extremely open," says the event's Director of Race Operations, Andy Hindley. Size-wise the boat will be 70ft long with a 4.5m maximum draft, and maximum rig height of around 31m (the exact figure is still to be decided). At present there is no beam limitation nor minimum weight. "We are toying with the weight, because we don't want to typeform the boats too much," says Hindley.

Despite the open nature of the new rule, they will be placing limitations on some aspects of the boat. "We're going to specify certain things about the keel which could be a weight and dimension or an equation to dictate the shape of the keel bulb," says Hindley. "So what we don't want is for people to spend lots and lots of money in development there." The mast is also likely to be standardised in a similar way to the VO60 rule, based on a centre of gravity and a weight-type rule, so Open 60-style wingmasts are out (for this race at least...)

The idea of the restrictions is to make it hard for teams to make significant competitive gains by spending large sums of money. "If we write this rule correctly and the Notice of Race and run the event correctly if you spend an awful lot of money you have a very very very small gain," says Hindley.

Hindley feels that with these measures in place and having the boats build to standards from either ABS or DNV [the Norwegian classification society] then there is possibly no reason to specify a minimum weight for the boat.

Materials will be limited for reasons of cost and safety. "Boats can be carbon, but we will be limiting certain types of high modulus carbon fibre. There will be limited material restrictions for keels too and they won't be allowing any curved foils." Curved foils are substantially more expensive to build than straight ones, although conceivably this is a development which could be introduced for future races.

The hull will have to have a certain angle of vanishing stability and will have to self right. "We'd like to keep the AVS at 142deg as it was before," says Hindley, "although we are still considering changing that because we're insisting on a self righting test. I don't think we'll drop it as low as an Open 60 [125 or 127.5 deg according to the FICO or IMOCA rules] but it might come down a few degrees. What we don't want to say is that if the boats self right then we don't need to worry about the AVS, because what happens then is that you will get a boat which will self right, but will tip over really easily."

Sail area restrictions are still being decided, although Hindley thinks they will probably limit the mainsail area but headsails may not be restricted. "If we don't do that we'll have to limit overhangs someway [as per the Open 60 rules] and that would limit sail area, because otherwise the rig gets moved further and further back to give you bigger and bigger sail area and that will start to get ridiculous." At present there are no limits on bowsprit or spinnaker pole length. "There is a point where if the bowsprit is not retractible then it is going to be a hindrance sailing in certain directions - the weight in something that long is going to be quite heavy."

There is no limitation on the number of appendages boats can have. As mentioned earlier appendages can't be curved. "We are only allowing one degree of freedom - so the appendage can either go up and down [ie a daggerboard] or it can rotate [ie a rudder] or it can swing. So you can't have a keel that can swing and go backwards and forwards [a system some Minis have]," explains Hindley. Similarly 60ft trimaran-style daggerboards which on some boats can be twisted, canted, etc will be prohibited.

Hindley says that kick-up rudders would be allowed. "That is a safety feature, so it would be sensible to allow that. A rudder in a cassette would certainly be allowed. But whether the weight of all that is worth it."

We will have to wait until the designers have put their thinking caps on before we know how many rudders boats arfe likely to have. Open 60s have twin rudders for security and because of their sizable beam, but this has come about to add form stability to the hull to counter the 10deg rule [where when static the boat much heel no more than 10deg with all lateral ballast deployed]. As a result Hindley thinks that the Volvo Ocean 70 may not have the same extreme beam as the Open 60s. "We're very conscious at the moment, working with the rules that we don't end up with a type formed boat before we make the rules typeforms. We want to be able to give the designers enough freedom to express themselves."

Among the designers who have helped Volvo conceive the new boat have been Farr, Rob Humphries, Merfyn Owen and Juan Kouyoumdjian along with gear manufacturers such as Southern Spars and North Sails.

One of the significant causes of hate directed towards the old boat was the amount of stacking required - during every manoeuvre it was necessary to move 1.5-2 tonnes of kit from one side of the boat to the other. To this end Volvo have substantially reduced the number of sails teams will be allowed to use during the race from 38 to 20, with a maximum of 7-9 sails being measured in for each leg.

"We believe that it is impossible to stop people stacking," says Hindley. "However saying that - you can't stack what you haven't got!" The result is that teams may be forced to use roller furling headsails and will also have to develop sails that work over bigger wind ranges and angles which Hindley says is a good development and one likely to filter back into the cruising market.

Despite the bigger more powerful boat crew numbers have been reduced from 13 to 9. However an all-female crew are allowed to sail with 11 and if there at least five women on board boats can take 10. With the reduced crew and sail wardrobe it is possible that teams may opt to use roller furling headsails, although this decision is being left open. So with a navigator or skipper out of the watch system, it is likely that the watch system will also have to be reappraised.

Two boat teams are also banned, unless both boats are going to be campaigned in the race. Hindley says they are still looking at the way this rule can be worded, but may just borrow the same rule as the America's Cup has in this respect.

"We think we've got a very sexy product which people will like to sail," sums up Hindley.
A problem with going Open class and trying to encourage design innovation is that is can lead to a less evenly matched fleet. "That is possibly true," says Hindley. But by prescribing keel dimensions and possibly weight and also a righting moment, you should end up with boats with a similar performance. What we might see is a larger number of people on the podium and people passing each other on the race course, because the boats perform differently in different conditions. That's got to be interesting hasn't it?"

How much

"We wanted to make it more commercially viable to give sponsors including Volvo a better return," says Hindley. "To give the sailors something they wanted to sail to motivate them to go out to sell the product to get the money to enter the race. We want more boats than we had last time."

The aim of course is to get campaign costs down. The figure mooted previously was $10 million, but Hindley believes it could be done for a lot less. "If you really really pushed it I think you could do it for $6 million. You'd have to cut a lot of corners and your chances of winning would be small. $8 million - much better, $10 million - you probably won't need to spend more than that to do really really well."

Equally Hindley admits that they will never be able to stop campaigns from spending money if they are intent upon it. "People will always find ways of spending more money. People have come up with some great ideas such as if the syndicate paid Volvo $10 million and then Volvo paid all the syndicate bills then you'd know where the money was going and you'd be able to control it. But that's just not true."

So in short - Volvo Ocean 70 campaigns will cost somewhere between one third to a half of what the richer campaigns spent last time.

The course

The number of legs has been reduced from nine to seven and, significantly, waypoint/gates have been added to the course which are significant for the scoring (see below) and there will also be in port racing, aimed primarily at producing a spectacle for the public at all the stopovers with the exception of the start and finish ports.

For the in-port racing boats will be allowed on extra crewmember as well as being able to carry three extra non-participating guests on board, who will comprise a sponsor, a member of the press and a representative of Volvo.

It is anticipated that the single in-port race will last for about 3-4 hours and will be held the weekend prior to the restart. "It is all spectator appeal orientated," says Hindley. "We are going to make as much effort with that as we can, to get people involved. It should be a great hit for the port as well as giving local people the opportunity to see the boats and for media to come along and sample it."

Leg one: Mediterranean port (possibly Monaco)-Cape Town (waypoint at Fernando de Noronha island off Brazil, plus possibly another)
Leg two: Cape Town-an Australiasian port (gates at Kerguelen and Eclipse Islands)
Leg three: Australasia to Rio (gate at Cape Horn)
Leg four: Rio to Baltimore (gate at Fernando de Noronha)
Leg five: Annapolis to Southampton (pitstop in New York, gate at Lizard Point)
Leg six: Southampton to Gothenberg
Leg seven: Gothenberg to another Baltic port (possibly Kiel)

Scoring:

The basic scoring for the legs will remain the same as last time, with no weighting to differentiate between shorter and longer legs. So if there are 12 boats, the winner of a leg will score 12 points, second place will get 11, etc.

However in addition this 50% points will be scorable at gates - so in a 12 boat race the winner of for example the section of leg two from Cape Town to Kerguelen will score 6 points. "It's a way of weighting the leg that is different to before," says Hindley. "Some legs have two scoring waypoints, so sometimes you can score as many points during a leg as you can at the end of it."

In port racing will also score 50% of the normal points system and will amount to 20% of the total points scorable.

Timing:

Because of the dramatic increase in performance of the new Volvo Ocean 70s and the fewer stopovers the duration of the next Volvo Ocean Race has been reduced by two months. It is also expected that the duration of stopovers will be shortened. The race will now start in the second week in November.

"You can't chop a month off each end because of your arrival times in certain destinations like North America is governed by the weather situation in the south Atlantic and the local weather in the US," says Hindley. "If you took a month off the beginning and you arrived a month earlier in the States - you'd find it'd be snowing!"

The shortening of the race is also the reason the race is not starting from Southampton as those who followed the Route du Rhum will atest. "Starting from Southampton in November is not the best option because of the weather in the English Channel and crossing the Bay of Biscay," confides Hindley.

Weather routing

This will still be prohibited during the race and the system used for the last race where each boats were allowed to nominate 10 websites for each leg is to be abandoned.

Instead Volvo may compile weather packages for the boats that will be sent through daily. "We won't analyse anything because every boat has different polars. The boats will get raw data. They will know what type of raw data is coming, " says Hindley. "Or we might have a stock of race information at race HQ which we'll keep updating and they can grab it whenever they like. Or at the beginning of each leg ask the teams what they want and then we'll collate it, so that they don't have to look at 80 different websites and they don't have to be on-line for ages to find it. It will all be packaged up so it is the cheapest method of transferring it. So every team gets the same information and all the analysis is down to the guy on the boat."

Hindley says that communications costs for some of the teams in the last race amounted to $100,000 per month (for 9 months).

Other races

In addition to the Volvo Baltic Race announced last week, Volvo are also introducing the Volvo Pacific Ocean Race to be held in 2007 for the new Volvo Ocean 70s. This event will visit Asian ports, including China and Japan, crossing the Pacific ocean to San Francisco and San Diego in the USA.

Tomorrow - gets the reaction of Volvo Ocean Race CEO Glenn Bourke as well as several potential skippers to the announcement.

Is this what you expected? What do you think about the boat, is it fast enough? Do you think campaign costs will be reduced by the amount proposed? Would you turn up and watch them racing in a stop-over port? Would you hit the boardrooms and ask for the money based on this proposal? Email your thoughts to feedback@thedailysail.com or click here to communicate via a text box.