Empire building - part 2

Today Mark Turner explains why he is backing the Open 60 class rather than the 60ft trimarans

This article follows on from part 1 of our interview with Mark Turner yesterday.

In terms of OC Group's boats - Kingfisher 2, the G-Class catamaran for a long time sitting on the hard in East Cowes is in the process of being sold to become the latest in Baron Rothschild's fleet of Gitana racing multihulls. Meanwhile Ellen's contract with retail giant Kingfisher is coming to an end imminently and Turner thinks it likely they will purchase the B&Q Castorama trimaran when the contract finally concludes, either to charter to other campaigns or support their Open 60 programs.

Turner has now clearly pinned his colours on the IMOCA Open 60 class. The Offshore Challenges Sailing Team are aiming to run two or three Open 60 campaigns, taking in the Barcelona World Race in 2007 and the Vendee Globe in 2008. One of these campaigns will certainly involve Nick Moloney. However at present there is no sponsor in place for this. nor has a designer been finally chosen.

Then there is question of who will join the Sailing Team since Sam Davies' departure last year. Turner explains the situation: "Everything we are doing on the sailing team front is linked to building Open 60 campaigns and if we can get to the point of having two new builds to do, then obviously that is four sailors in the Barcelona World Race. We have a short list of skippers we’d love to work with but we are not about to take people on in the way we have invested in the past with both Nick and Sam and ultimately with me with Ellen in the beginning as well. We don’t need to do that. We need to build the campaigns and see what will keep us fit. Some of those skippers are already looking for money as well in their own right and if they find it maybe we’ll work with them. We are working a little bit the other way round."

As to why he is backing the Open 60 class at the moment, the reasons are simple. Alongside the TP52, the IMOCA class is one of the fastest growing in our sport at the moment. "I guess it is a pretty dynamic class," agrees Turner. "Right now there are 12 new boats either being finished, just gone in the water or being designed or being built [more on this next week]. So that’s amazing for any class. And those boats have diverse objectives. They are different nationalities.

"From a safety and results point of view they are significantly very proven and the statistics add up. The boats are relatively cheap [compared to VO70s]. The Vendee is always a driver, but there are projects now, particularly non-French ones which exist already or are being formed that exist for the championship of which the Vendee is just a part. Increasingly a lot of people are going into this circuit who won’t go singlehanded, so that is something which will rebalance it. For sure in the Barcelona race we will have people who won’t do the Vendee, but maybe their projects will. So what we have pushed people to present to sponsors is enter the circuit, create a situation where you have different skippers for the two-up bit and the singlehanded bit."

Another advantage of IMOCA's four year rolling circuit Turner says is that it should reduce the chances and associated mean the problems of boats being built at the last minute to compete in the Vendee. "From a sponsor point of view the Vendee is the worst risk that exists in sailing statistically and if you build a whole sponsorship program around the Vendee if you can be so easily out after a week or three weeks. And if that is the only race you are doing that is quite a scary proposition to a sponsor. And as costs increase as they do inevitably, spreading risk is a really important thing."

The Open 60 class, IMOCA, has taken control of its calendar and now dictates as a group the events its members will do, teams kept in line thanks to a group insurance policy dependent upon them being part of IMOCA. The four year program offered to sponsors includes ten major events, although whether the public, class, teams or sponsors need three round the world races within this cycle is debatable. However the class is still in need of an overall sponsor so that a full time staff member can be employed to run it.

The four year continuous circuit is something Volvo are clearly interested in achieving for their VO70s. Turner thinks adding the Volvo Baltic Race and the Volvo Pacific Race are exactly the right things for Volvo to do (he is a fan of the event having competed on board the services entry British Defender in 1989-90) but worries that the Volvo Ocean Race itself has the tradition of being one 'big' event every four years and thus sponsorship is hard to sell sponsorship beyond this period.

Turner hopes the Barcelona World Race will result in the traditionally separate worlds of Anglo-Saxon fully crewed racing and the French solo scene lining up against one another. Would Russell Coutts and Paul Cayard two up in an Open 60 be better than Michel Desjoyeaux and Ellen MacArthur? Answers on a postcard here please.

While the IMOCA circuit includes an increasing amount of fully crewed events, Turner is adamant they need to keep the lid on this firmly: "It has to stay a shorthanded class for its survival. The day it becomes fully crewed, 10 up or something, it will probably die under the pressure of that. While the people inside the trimaran circuit don’t agree with that point of view, the fully crew Grand Prix stuff is certainly at the core of that circuit's demise which is sad, but is the case, if you look at the cost increase."

When the latest Kingfisher sponsorship was announced, the third part of the program was supposed to have included a 60ft trimaran campaign. After all Ellen had spent a considerable amount of time racing these boats as part of Alain Gautier's Foncia team, including the two handed Transat Jacques Vabre.



Turner is adamant that the 60ft multihull circuit is never going to die in France. "The multihulls are extraordinary. The boats are amazing to sail. Visually they are incredible. The only images I have seen that have caused a whole room of non-sailing people to pull back in their chairs when they watched them are pictures of 60ft trimarans. Nothing else has ever done that. They are fantastic."

However ORMA the 60ft multihull class should have made much more sweeping changes after the disastrous 2002 Route du Rhum. The class insisting on the use of shorter rigs and smaller sail plans for singlehanded races might have been one solution. Oddly the Transat in 2004 may have excaperated the situation as in that race - supposed the most hard core event in the class' four year circuit, upwind across the North Atlantic there were twelve 60ft trimaran finishers out of twelve starters. "I can’t explain that," says Turner. "It is upwind, but structurally it was harder. Maybe we were just very lucky. But in some ways because of that race the pressure came off again to make any fundamental change."

While Baron Rothschild's new Multi Cup may be breathing new life into the 60ft trimaran class, separating away the potentially disastrous shorthanded offshore events, Turner doesn't feel it addresses the core problems with the class. "Currently the costs are too high to justify the inshore racing, because the coverage is very low and you can’t justify the hospitality - it doesn’t work as an equation. And is inshore racing going to make it more international? It might mean some other sailors did it, but from a sponsorship point of view we could have a Grand Prix in the UK next week and have not many people turn up to watch it. It is not about just existing in different countries - there are a lot more key elements to make that happen." A classic example is the first event in the Multi Cup which will see the 60ft trimarans arriving in the heart of central London next week -. Hurrah! This is all great except that there are no non-French boats competing, nor even any non-French crew, thus making it a hard story to get the non-French media excited about it.

Another perhaps more extreme solution is perhaps to leave the 60ft trimarans to Multi Cup-type events and introduce a new purpose-built type of boat for the offshore short-handed events. Perhaps a 75ft long multihull using a 60ft trimaran-size rig like B&Q Castorama for example (our suggestion, not Turner's).

"I think it is too early to tell what will happen in the French multihull world. Yves Parlier launched his new class in Paris in December, but some people don’t see it as there are vested interests in the existing 60s. There are a lot of boats and it seems mad to walk away from them - but there is a fundamental safety problem or in a sense there is a line you cross – boats break, especially new boats when people are pushing to the limit."

And no, it's not true that the next acquisition by OC Events will be the Volvo Ocean Race.