The maverick

James Boyd hooked up with controversial Argentinian yacht designer Juan Kouyoumdjian in Valencia

When the IMS 50 Krazy K-Yote II arrived in Cowes to complete in the 1999 Admiral's Cup and, sporting a fixed wing mast rather than a conventional tubular spar, was quickly banned from the competition, Juan Kouyoumdjian set the tone for his career as one of yacht racing's most left field designers. While it could be argued that being not allowed to race made this IMS 50 something of a turkey, Kouyoumdjian's approach as a 'free thinker' has since made him valuable currency in the exacting world of the America's Cup.

Coming from Argentina Kouyoumdjian sailed Optimists in the same club at around the same time as Mani Frers, son of the great German Frers. Kouyoumdjian admits that the Frers family played a great part in fuelling his desire to become a yacht designer. "I’m sure it is the same for every Argentinian or South American that is wishing to go down the same route. They [Frers] are a great office and they do great boats."

Kouyoumdjian graduated in naval architecture from Southampton University in June 1993, (a contempory of esteemed colleagues like Frers Jnr, Marcellino Botin, Jason Ker, Mark Mills and Guillaume Verdier) and went straight to work for Philippe Briand in La Rochelle, primarily concentrating on the design of France's 1995 America's Cup challenger. Early in 1996 he parted company with Briand to set up on his own and worked on a few small projects before being invited by Luc Gelluseau, with whom he was racing on a Corel 45, to work on Le Defi's 2000 challenger.

"We got a bit of a surprise when we started sailing with the French boat because we weren’t particularly fast so we went through extensive modifications and the boat kept going better and better in our race against the clock. I guess the guys from Prada were quite impressed with that work we did there as they made me an offer to join them for the following Cup," says Kouyoumdjian. Ironically despite Prada being a team with much better funding than the French, Kouyoumdjian was to go through much the same process with the Italian team's 2003 campaign when, during the opening stages of the Louis Vuitton Challenger series, they found themselves chopping up some significant parts of the boat.

With so many America's Cup Class boats having been designed and built and with so much research carried out into their minutae one would think it hard to design a slow Cup boat. "I think the experience we had [in the team] was the big reason we ended up where we were," says Kouyoumdjian by way of explanation of the Prada episode. "When you do a lot of America’s Cups and think you have seen it all, you very quickly get to the situation where you become a bit relaxed and not very innovative, thinking that no one will come with anything faster because you have done it all. In fact that is never true. So we were a bit guilty of that due to the huge experience of that team."

Kouyoumdjian is now carrying out the 'freethinking' role within the Farr-led BMW Oracle Racing design team and thoroughly enjoying it. "I have been given the freedom to sneak my nose in everywhere, and take every aspect of the project to a more innovative or a further level. I am very comfortable. I have responsibility in that I am asked to come up with a certain amount of deliverables and most of them are to do with the hydrodynamics of the boat and particularly the hull on which I work with Bruce [Farr] directly." This time around BMW Oracle Racing's design team is believed to have a flatter structure and is not so Farr-dominated. Farr is still responsible for the bulk of the design process and Kouyoumdjian describes his role as the great designer's 'what if?' man.

Talking to Kouyoumdjian you get a feeling of slight frustration that his Cup commitments are preventing him from focussing his creative juices on less restrictive classes. However working for Cup teams, he says, is the equivalent of carrying out a long term PhD in his vocation.

"I think that the America’s Cup should be considered as the mecca of yacht design. Although the boats are not extremely complicated, and they are old fashioned now both technologically and design-wise mostly because of the limitations of the rule, but nonetheless due to the budgets and the time you have to design them, they are very interesting for designers to be involved with. So since I've graduated I've been into it and it is a very good way to sharpen your design skills."

So would he prefer to see an America's Cup in 60ft trimarans? "If you ask me today what is the Formula 1 of yachting - it has to be the trimarans. It is funny this world of yachting, because I think we are in one extreme and we think our concepts and ideas are pretty clear and we have a pretty good view of what we define as 'the Formula 1' or 'the most advanced yachting'. But most of the people out there, in particular those paying the cheques, don’t think that way. Even a lot of designers involved with the America’s Cup, you talk to them about multihulls and they give you a disgusted face."

Over this winter all the America's Cup teams will be throwing considerable resources into working out the optimum way of changing their boats to Version 5 of the America's Cup Rule including a drop of one tonne maximum displacement, 100mm more draft and 8% more downwind sail area, ready for the 2005 Acts. While the official line is that this will 'turbo charge' the boats the reality is that the changes will be bearly noticable off the boats and only to a relatively small extent on them. Many people, Kouyoumdjian included, feel that since these changes weren't wholescale - why incur so much cost to the teams in making them at all?

"I must say I was disappointed when that [Version 5] came out," he says. "We were quite guilty of that because BMW Oracle was part of that discussion. What they did with the rig was ridiculous. 4.1m and one tonne - big deal! I don’t know what the logic was, but the people that were involved in those discussions I think they lost track in the initiative. I think they started with a clear goal - some changes had to be done - but they did the bear minimum. In fact they might as well have left it how it was."

The last few years have seen Kouyoumdjian move from La Rochelle to Milan (for the Prada campaign) in 2000 and this year to Valencia. He and his team now number eight in their office (see the photo at the bottom of this article), a five minute drive from the America's Cup village. In the office aside from pure yacht design they are able to carry out complex studies into Computation Fluid Dynamics and Finite Element Analysis as well as producing their own drawings.

"I think an office that is trying to be creative and pushing the limits of yacht design every day is limited by the quality of their drawings," says Kouyoumdjian. "You can only be as creative as boat building allows you to be. It is pointless to create something that is unbuildable. So the way we express what we design is very important. I think the people you work with on the construction phase, they limit the extent to which you push a design."

Their tools include the leading CFD software, that requires an 18 CPU cluster to be harnessed at the local university and even that is not powerful enough claims Kouyoumdjian.

So what makes their design house unique? "I think our biggest advantage is that we tend to look at projects from an innovative point of view. And we have been lucky enough to be involved with America’s Cups and other projects that have allowed us to… Because being innovative is easy but being innovative and succeeding is difficult. So we know a bunch of things that look interesting, but we know they’re not: that combination of innovative things with almost 10 years of experience of trying all these things and being badly beaten by a lot of things which didn’t work is starting to pay off."

Kouyoumdjian acknowledges that they would not be the best people to come to for an average white run-of-the-mill cruising boat.

Saying this he believes there are occasions when the latest technology can be applied with some effect on traditional boats and among the projects he is interested in at the moment is a possible contract to design a new 6 metre. Also in this vein is Kouyoumdjian's enthusiasm for the Star - a boat he sails when time allows. Currently leading German builder Leonard Mader is building a new Star to his design that he will sail in the 2005 Worlds. "The Star class is a one design, but they have construction tolerances to leave a certain amount of room for improvements. The differences are not very big between boats, but having said that the level of people sailing those boats is so high that it is the little things that make difference." His new Star will look much like any other Star but incorporates a few little tricks...

Aside from his all-consuming work with BMW Oracle Racing Kouyoumdjian's other big project at the moment is designing the ABN AMRO boats for the 2005 Volvo Ocean Race. While the first boat is nearing completion in Holland Kouyoumdjian has been pulling his hair out trying to get features of his design past the RORC Rating Office that administer the VO70 rule.

"They put in the title ‘Open 70’ and a lot of things we have done in the first boat and we were thinking about extending on the second boat, we know already that they don’t like them. But it is not explicit in the rule. They are saying the rule is what is written plus what is in their head. We are saying the rule is only what is written. So we have a conflict there. I think fundamentally they think that a rule that creates different boats and boats of different performance is by definition a bad rule. They think that a rule is only good if it outputs boats of similar performance and I am so in disagreement with them on that. Because whether the boats go at different speeds is down to the work of the designer and the work of the crew."



At this stage precise details of the design of the ABN AMRO Volvo 70 are not public, but the boat is to be launched towards the end of November and is likely to be shipped directly to 'somewhere in Portugal' where part of Kouyoumdjian's contract with the Dutch bank is that he and skipper Mike Sanderson are inside the boat when it is put through its 180deg inversion test.

But the real reason for this article is about the one boat so far described where Kouyoumdjian has been able to use his full creativity: Frank Pong's new 115ft supermaxi Maiden Hong Kong.

"That is the dream of every designer because there is no limit," says Kouyoumdjian. "There is a person [Frank Pong] who loves sailing and loves to go fast and wants something that will take him faster than ever before."

This boat, the first of its size to sport not only a canting keel, but a canting rotating wingmast rig, like a scaled-up version of a 60ft trimaran rig, is due for its first sea trials imminently...

Read more about the design of this new weapon shortly on thedailysail