11th hour hunt for money

Carbon Challenge's Campaign Director Tom Weaver looks at his Volvo Ocean Race team's options

Times are tense within Volvo Ocean Race HQ at present. While there are several strong teams lined up and rearing to go, others, including some yet to show their head above the parapet, are still struggling to make it to the start line with just seven months to go before the race kicks off from Alicante.

A recent team to emerge has been Carbon Challenge, who unlike the others has made the commitment to the race by formally entering, but are still beating on the door of board rooms to secure the necessary funding.

One aspect of this campaign not fully expressed in the initial press is simply the calibre of the people involved with it. As Tom Weaver who is co-ordinating the sailing team points out: “It is a big group and these are people I’ve worked with before mostly in the America’s Cup - they were some of the smartest and definitely the most talented guys in the AC, but who knew nothing about sailing when I met them.”

This is no idle banter. With Carbon Challenge operating out of a small office in Valencia, their advisory board includes Uwe Sasse whose career has been in the sports marketing and the sport fashion industry. Sasse founded and for the first year managed United Internet Team Germany. His wife Jacqueline (left) is CEO and Commercial Director of the Carbon Challenge was once Commercial Director for Eurosport. It was she who acquired United Internet as the backer of the German Cup team. Her company subsequently won the contact to co-market Club Goleta the official guest hospitality programme for the 32nd America’s Cup.

Kiwi Brand Manager Gavin Brown (right), now Brand Manager for Carbon Challenge, has worked in the sailing and sports fashion industry, most notably for Line 7 where he came up with the Red Sock campaign for Team New Zealand in Auckland. For the 32nd America’s Cup he was Head of Licensing for ACM.

Involved on the periphery of Carbon Challenge is also former FIFA Marketing CEO and one time Alinghi General Manager Patrick Magyar.

“In reality, they had been working on an AC campaign for 18-20 months and it all went pear shaped,” explains Tom Weaver of how Carbon Challenge came to get involved with the Volvo Ocean Race. “They had a platform for the AC and the platform is incredibly viable. When it got explained to me, my first impression was that it was ‘just another green thing’. Then I realised it wasn’t at all. Being in the US, which has never signed the Kyoto Protocol, it is not that relevant, but in the rest of the world, governments are cracking down on corporations to actually doing something by law to reduce their carbon footprint, so they have to do something. Carbon Challenge provides a business to business vehicle and a way of communicating this.”

As he points out Carbon Challenge is not just a marketing and communications tool, it is also a corporate training entity and has partnerships with leading companies such as Price Waterhouse Coopers to provide corporations with carbon footprint analysis and the implementation of carbon management strategies. This is not optional for companies based in countries signed up to Kyoto, it is mandatory by law.



Of the Carbon Challenge campaign, the Volvo Ocean Race is but a part. According to Weaver more of their resources are currently going into setting up the teaching academy and also the ‘Boathouse’, a mobile building designed by David Chipperfield, best known within the sailing community for the impressive Veles e Ventes building (above) at Port America’s Cup. The Boathouse aims to be a ‘best practise’ example of eco-efficient construction.

Weaver (left) himself is a well known figure within the sport dating back to the 1980s when he built maxis such as Rothmans and NCB Ireland plus an on the water career that included wins in the 1992 Commodores Cup and 1994 Kenwood Cup plus three world championships. He has been a project manager at Farr International where he worked on several Whitbread 60 campaigns and for a while was a crew on board Steve Fossett’s maxi-cat PlayStation. In recent years, until 2006, he was Technical Director for Vincenzo Onorato’s Mascalzone Latino Cup campaigns.

“I am on the Board of Directors, running the sailing and instituting the design, acquiring a boat and finding a sailing team,” says Weaver of his role within Carbon Challenge. “Having said all that, of course we are really late. We obviously have to get an old boat. We’ve got Pirates. I am in negotiation right now to co-operate with other teams. I find it completely refreshing compared to America’s Cup stuff. All the other teams are willing to pitch in and help and do what they can.”

Weaver says that they formally entered and have got permission to use the Volvo-owned former Pirates of the Caribbean boat since this was necessary for their marketing team in their quest for money. However he is well progressed in his discussions with both Ericsson and Puma over possibly using either of the former ABN AMRO boats.

Obviously decisions about the boat they are going to sail and how much work can be done to that boat to bring it up to V2 of the Volvo Open 70 rule are entirely dependent upon when they secure funds and can press the ‘go’ button.

Realistically Weaver reckons that they have a slightly better than 50-50 chance of making it. “I think we can make this happen. We have a group of very high profile sponsors which we are going backwards and forwards with. Right now we have enough seed money but I am going to spend as little as possible of that until I know we can go. So my decisions will change from one month to the next, as to whether I can buy a new keel or build a new mast.”

According to Weaver he has a skipper waiting in the wings and has had a deluge of crew applications. “The response has amazed me. I am surprised how many people are keen to go and I’m talking about 2 or 3x race veterans, really good people. It won’t be a problem finding a sailing team.” However the job of choosing the sailing team will come down to the skipper once they have the green light.

“There are plenty of people ready to do this even on an old boat knowing exactly the protocol we are going under right now. I am impressed. I guess it is just fall out from the AC going pear-shaped again. If this was an AC cycle I wouldn’t be able to get sail slots or crew and if I did get crew they would be horrendously expensive. So right now the whole industry is wide open to put a program like this together. We could do a reasonable job with limited time, as long as we are being smart.”

Weaver says the team has a “soft deadline” of 15 April after which decisions start to get limited. “I have a lot of options then. I can get all my sail orders in and we can be sailing a boat immediately, so we won’t be far behind anyone in terms of sailing a boat.”

Obviously this depends upon the boat they finally end up with. Might the Farr-designed Pirates be a better option than one of the beamy ABN AMRO boats on the new race course? The fact that all the new boats appear to be developments of ABN AMRO One indicates otherwise.

Weaver shares his view on this: “ Pirates might be a really good option once we’ve V2ed it, again depending upon time, because it needs more work than the other two boats. From a hull form point of view with all this all this light air sailing we might have an opportunity to jag a leg or get on the podium a couple of times from India to China. Whereas if we take ABN AMRO One or Two, the new boats are developments of that and they are going to be faster, so you are always going to be a little bit on the hind leg. Whereas with Pirates, we might have an opportunity to do well on some legs, if we can get the keel to cant fast enough and put a decent rig in it, etc. I don’t think we’ll ever be aiming to win or be on the podium all the way around, but we might surprise a few people potentially. That is what we are looking at from a VPP and a weather study point of view - which would be the better boat.”

Another aspect is that Pirates recently has been used by the now defunct Mean Machine team and then by the Russians as a training boat and is not in as good shape as the ABN AMRO boats which have been looked after by teams.

Weaver continues: “The biggest issue is the keel change which is a huge problem, because now the V2 rule requires that you weigh fin and bulb, so everyone is going to be doing massively expensive hollowed out fins and you need a particular billet of steel for that. The lead time for the steel is 6-8 months. The question is - do I order my piece of steel? There is one lying around which we could use, but that still has to be machined and cut, etc. Are we running out of time on that? That is the area where if you had the time and money I’d work on - the foils. But it will come down to here’s the money today, and we will look at our options and go with what we’ve got. The later it gets, the less our options become until it gets to the stage where it is not safe or not feasible to send people around the world on one of these boats.”

Back to the thorny subject of money and Weaver says they have benefited from the World Business Council for Sustainable Development coming on board. Among their membership are 200 of the world’s biggest companies who Carbon Challenge’s budget seekers have been approaching. Given that Europe is at the forefront of carbon footprint awareness Weaver reckons that a potential sponsor is most likely to come from there.

There is also the prospect of alliances with other Volvo Ocean Race teams, either the existing ones with spare boats or other teams still attempting to find money. During the recent Volvo Ocean Race conference in Alicante they all had the chance to meet up. “The worst thing that happens is that the three of us get one third of the money we need - we all get 5 million Euros each and none of us go. So we are in touch with each other so that we’ll make it happen.”

Plus the race organisers are very keen for them to enter the race and are trying to oil the wheels as much as they can to make it happen.

So at present it is a case of standing by. While many sailing teams, not just within Volvo, are jumping on the eco-bandwagon, Carbon Challenge do appear to be the one to have more seriously embraced this concept, for which of course our wind-powered sport is a hugely compatible marketing tool.