Open 60 rule changes

Significant amendments in the pipeline next week - but Alex Thomson and Mike Golding wonder if they are what is required?

At a time when their fleet is going supernova with 30 boats expected on the start line of this year's Vendee Globe, of which 20 are new in this four year cycle, it might seem odd that the IMOCA Open 60 class feels they should be putting their house in order. The old adage - if it ain't broke, why fix it? - might seem to apply. But as we have stated on this site in the past, the terrible demise of the ORMA 60 trimaran class, from its high note prior to the 2002 Route du Rhum when 18 boats took the start line, to more or less non-existence in the space of five years, is something that rings loudly in the ears of IMOCA and its ever increasing membership. This is why next week proposals are to be voted on at an Extraordinary General Meeting of the class to implement some major amendments to their rules.

So are IMOCA wise to be legislating early to prevent their possible ORMA-demise or is its membership being overly cautious?

As Loick Peyron pointed out in our interview with him (and he should know being one of the individuals to return to one hull from three) there are distinct differences between the IMOCA and ORMA scenarios. ORMA was an almost exclusively French class with only a handful of their sponsors having interests outside France. In comparison IMOCA is much more international with boats even from Canada and the US.

60ft trimarans are substantially more capable of self-destruction than 60ft monohulls, their most obvious issue being capsize. IMOCA Open 60s have more or less solved any equivalent capsize or stability issues. Also the IMOCA class was quick to stamp on any pretensions of being both an inshore and offshore/crewed and shorthanded class. Five up is as fully crewed as they get.

Unlike the ORMA 60 class, IMOCA has no equivalent of Groupama II (or Jet Service V if you want to go back another couple of decades) to spoil the fun by winning all the races. The IMOCA class at present is considerably more competitive that the latter years of ORMA.

The facts are that a) it is impossible to make any boat 100% seaworthy when exposed to the ultimate conditions Mother Nature can conjure up and b) any genuine Open class is certain to have a number of technical issues over its lifetime as designers, builders and skippers and their teams push towards new limits.

The burning question is that while innovation has been rampant with the latest generation Open 60s - has it made them unsafe?

Back in the mid-1990s, some Open 60s were positively dangerous. At the time the boats were almost all-water ballasted only and, to maximise this ballast, had become extremely beamy with low freeboard and flat (occasionally even slightly concave) decks, lightweight with tiny bulbs. However sadly this generation of boats proved themselves prone not only to inverting, but remaining inverted. There were three instances of this mid-Indian Ocean during the 1996 Vendee Globe that resulted in Tony Bullimore, Thierry Dubois and Raphel Dinelli having to be rescued from their stricken upturned craft. Later, tragically, a similar capsize incident may have befallen French Canadian sailor Jerry Roufs, who disappeared mid-Pacific. The hull of his Open 60 Groupe LG II was spotted off the Chilean coast upside down several months later.

Two years later in the Around Alone, Giovanni Soldini famously rescued Isabelle Autissier when her boat failed to right from a full inversion while mid-Pacific. In 1998 Soldini himself suffered a knock-down in the middle of an attempt on the west to east transatlantic record, that resulted in the loss of his friend and crewman Andrea Romanelli.

So, yes, 1990s Open 60s were unsafe and so prior to the 2000 Vendee Globe a number of new safety requirements were wisely implimented by the class. This included rules limiting the angle of vanish stability (AVS), others stipulating a minimum amount of camber and 'deck volume' to ensure that boats, if they did turn turtle, would not remain that way. Importantly every Open 60 built since then has also been subject to a 180deg inversion test to prove that without their rig they can be righted from a full inversion - an exciting exercise that involves the skipper being inside their upside-down boat and canting the keel until the boat rights...



Since these rules were introduced there has been just one instance of an Open 60 showing a possible lack of stability when Jean-Pierre Dick's Virbac Paprec went through a truly impressive 360deg roll during the 2004 Transat (listen to our getting Dick to describe this incident here). But the fact is that Virbac Paprec came back upright, and skipper and boat survived the incident. Listening to Dick's account you get the impression that the safest possible, steel hulled cruising yacht would have suffered a similar fate. However it does highlight what many feel to be a limitation of the present IMOCA 60 stability rules - while they place limitations on static AVS, they don't take into account dynamic AVS, the effect of stability when a boat is rolled (as in the Virbac Paprec example), an issue which is believed to be greater with the latest generation boats with their heavier keels and larger sail plans.

So back to the present and amendments to Open 60 stability requirements is to be addressed at an IMOCA EGM next week where they are proposing to centralise water ballast tanks on the fore and aft centreline at the same time limiting tanks to two (ie no central ballast). They are also looking to increase AVS for the worst case scenario (ie with all movable ballast deployed on the wrong side) by four degrees to 112deg for all boats.

While no one would criticise any class in attempting to make their boats safer, there seems to be concensus among the skippers in the UK that the way being proposed to achieve this is perhaps overly dramatic and certainly overly costly.

As we have written extensively, the latest generation of IMOCA Open 60s are substantially more powerful than their predecessors. As all the boats must comply with what is possibly the earliest of class rules - that boats must heel by no more than 10 degrees with all their movable ballast (canting keel and water ballast) deployed in its least favourable configuration, so designers for a couple of decades now have been using form stability to create ultra-beamy boats enabling more ballast to be carried within the rule.

Unfortunately in the late 1990s designers also picked up on the fact that the hull form stability of boats can be improved for the benefit of the tests if they are 'sunk' by adding yet more water ballast around the buoyancy centreline, therefore allowing even more movable ballast to be employed. Hence the BeamMax of boats, after momentarily coming down for the 2000 race, are back up once again to 'approaching 6m' levels and most of the new generation boats ressemble giant water carriers - with huge ballast tanks in the bow and middle of the boat plus two separate tanks along both the heeled centre lines in the aft compartment. With all their tanks filled (not that this would ever happen) Open 60s can now literally double their displacement.

With this in mind Ecover skipper Mike Golding gives his view on IMOCA's latest proposal to improve stability: "It would have been a good idea if it had been introduced eight years ago, but unfortunately the horse has bolted on this one: the current fleet has got a lot of water ballast and the ballast was fitted when the decks were off. So whatever you now do you are going to have to rip out the inside of your boat, re-engineer it and rebuild it all through the companionway hatch or you are going to have to cut your roof off. It is a major. Even a conservative estimate for a boat like ours with the full compliment of ballast, I would hesitate to suggest we could get away with less than £300,000 to do that. And the other side of that there are a lot more boats on the circuit so when you come back from the Vendee, the residual value of our boats is £700-800k, because there is so much availability. So you are spending nearly half the value of the boat to make it fit a rule.

"For me moving the AVS worst case is interesting, but what I want to know is why we are trying to do it so hard? Where is the evidence that there is actually a problem? When you press people who are keen on this on it, they seem fixated on moving it, but don’t know why they are moving it. They just want to move it in a good direction, which is fair enough. If you really press, people will cite Virbac in the 2004 Transat as being an indication of the fact we need to do something. But I would say 'well hang on, let's look at that: she capsized, she rerighted ,she turned on her engine and she made her way home. Is that not the desired outcome? And also would 4 or 2 more degrees of worse case AVS actually make any difference to that? If you are already over that far it only takes a slightly bigger wave to get you over. So I think from a safety perspective the AVS worst case is a bit of a red herring, although I understand why people are driving in that direction. But I think to do it with the ballast is just crazy, because it is costing so much money for so little gain."

Hugo Boss skipper Alex Thomson agrees: "There is going to have to be a limit otherwise you do give people like me the license to do whatever they want. But to do it this way you end up with a bunch of one designs. If these changes are brought in, you could end up with another class. They should spend more time on the commercial aspects of it."

We should stress that Thomson and Golding are definitely not maintaining that improvements to stability is wrong, only the present proposal of how to achieve this is. Incurring massive expense for the fleet, they maintain could in turn have its own damaging effect on the class, either encouraging sponsors to pull the plug on campaigns or for a possible split to develop within the class.

Our view is that such rule changes don't come at the best time. Because so many new boats have been built in this Vendee Globe cycle, substantially fewer are likely to be built for the next, although rumour has it that two to four new boats are likely to start building towards the end of this year specifically for the next Barcelona World Race. It should be remembered that part of the reason for the huge number of new builds this time around is that so few were built for 2004 - just four, compared to eight in the 2000 Vendee Globe. Therefore if there is to be a wholescale improvement to stability why not make it greater, with more advance warning but introduce it prior to the next large crop of new builds happening prior to the 2016 Vendee Globe?


Forward ballast tank on board BT

Both Thomson and Golding cite cheaper ways of improving AVS. All of the canting keel boats for example have an electronic control mechanism for their keels (on Central Coast set-ups this is known as the PLC) and Artemis designer Simon Rogers has suggested a system whereby the PLC is programmed to dump the keel automatically in certain circumstances when heel angle reaches a 'critical' angle. This alone could dramatically improve AVS.

"That is something that needs to be looked at," says Golding. "I haven’t seen the kit working but it should be introduced as quickly as it can be once there is a workable system. It is a very very sensible system. But it is not that simple because it does rely on a lot of input. Originally it was described to me as something that dumps the keel, but obviously in a Chinese gybe you could end up with everything on the wrong side with the keel dumped. So it has to be an intelligent system and it has to know which way the boat has gone so that it knows which way to dump to, but that can all be done by the PLC. And it would seem extremely logical to me implement that. It is a quick way and a relatively cheap way and a completely understandable way of the class getting around the worse case AVS situation and even solving the Virbac problem. So I don’t understand why we aren’t looking at that rather than a solution that is going to cost us £300-400,000. One of the reasons cited for this was cost! Then on the other hand we find it is going to cost us a fortune to implement it. It is bizarre."

But Golding has a more all-encompassing solution: limit bulb weight and this is an item he hopes to have put on the agenda at next week's meeting: "The beauty of that is that you can set the level to encompass as many, if not all, of the current boats. If you limit the bulb weight you immediately limit beam, the amount of water you can carry and you limit mast height. Of course people can accept variables - they can have a very light very spindly mast or they can have a short, heavier, more aerodynamic mast - so they have choices, which is the purpose of the Open class, which I think is healthy and in the right direction."

For on the agenda too next week is a proposal to limit air draft to 30m for existing boats or 28.5m for new launches to take effect from 2010. Also to be voted on is restricting the size of mainsail flat tops to 3m. Both Golding and Thomson feel the concern with these proposals is that it WILL push all campaigns down the ORMA 60 route (where mast height was limited to 100ft) with everyone being obliged to go for wingmasts to get maximum efficiency from the sail plan. "It will take away any choice," says Thomson.

Golding agrees: "I don’t it like because I think we will end up with one design rigs. There will be an optimum solution and we will all have the same and I don’t think that is in keeping [with the class ethos]."

Interestingly what the proposals don't squarely address are two of the most widespread technical issues seen recently in the IMOCA fleet: mast and keel foil failures.

During the last Vendee Globe for example Mike Golding managed to sneak across the finish to take third place sans keel, but Nick Moloney was not so lucky having to retire to Brazil. Meanwhile Roland Jourdain's Sill et Veolia suffered a severe case of 'flutter' in her carbon fibre keel foil prior to the Vendee that was subsequently believed to have been repaired but then resulted in Jourdain being forced to retire half way into the Vendee Globe when his yacht's foil began to show cracks. (Another of the new requirements IMOCA are looking to introduce tests to monitor such keel issues by defining 'a minimal value of frequency vibration for keels (bending and/or torsion) and make regular tests mandatory.')

Ecover having experienced this in a major way on two occasions now, Golding says it is hard to legislate against keel foil failure: "Neither myself nor the designers have come up with a viable solution to the keel issue. I don’t know how to get there. I think people are learning and what you are finding now is that more and more boats have steel keels, that are stainless and not alloy, which is a good choice. So the designers are learning that they can’t do the things they thought they could do.

"Carbon blades are hopefully becoming more reliable (touch wood). The problem with carbon blades is not the keel itself, but the attachment to the rams. The keels are no longer dropping off the boats but the rams are becoming detached from the keel head. That seems to be more of problem, but again hopefully we are learning. Boats with carbon foils have successful going around the world now with new generation carbon keels and we hope we learn fast enough."



But the most recent issue has been a huge number of rigs breaking or more often coming down. As we have written about, the mast issues have a wide range of causes, from peelply being inadvertently left in the laminate by one builder to running with an unbalanced rig in a large sea way.

"It is a hard thing to do without preventing it from becoming a one design," says Golding of how to restrict rigs. "Just because you limit it to 28.5m, it doesn’t stop the mast from coming tumbling down. There is no evidence to suggest that bigger masts fall down more often than smaller masts. The point is that if you limit it to 28.5m what happens then is that everyone tries to drive weight out of the rig, so the only thing you can do better is to go ever lighter and that means more titanium, more composite fittings, and more and more unreliable components to make it stand up. If you look at our rig, you see a lot of really belt and braces attachments, really secure and we have lost mast height out of that choice but we have chosen to take it that way because we are doing the Vendee Globe, not racing around the cans. And we are using relatively low tech materials and the result is I think we have a fair degree of reliability in there. You think you are doing a good thing by limiting mast height but in reality you might be doing a bad thing."

While masts of all different configurations have come tumbling down over the course of the last year, one issue that has helped this along is that while all the boats have got more powerful in terms of their hull shape as well as their all-up displacement, mast heights have also grown and sail areas have increased - at the same time as spar designers have been attempting to pair weight from the rig wherever possible.

Overly cautious?

While there is all this talk of potential disaster in the class, the fact is that at present it situation looks rosy. Even if there is a 50% attriction rate in the Vendee Globe it will be nothing that hasn't happened before, only that with a larger fleet, and particularly a larger number of new boats it will feel substantially worse than it has ever felt before. In fact given the substantially higher level of preparation the boats have had this time we suspect the attrition rate will be lower in this year's Vendee Globe (assuming an average forecast).

The class are of course keen to limit costs, but in pretty much all other spheres of yachting this has proved ineffective and ironically there is strong evidence to suggest that the more you limit rules, the more resource (and money) teams then have to apply to get the best of out of them. No matter how much you limit costs, there is always the possibility of trying out limitless numbers of sails, of paying crew higher salaries, staying in better hotels, etc.

The joy of the IMOCA Open 60 class is that the most important races are singlehanded or shorthanded and to some degree this makes the class self-limiting in terms of cost. For example it has yet to be proved conclusively whether powerful large, heavy and therefore expensive boats such as the Juan K-designed Pindar or Artemis - the boats that the IMOCA membership seem keenest to ban - are in fact any quicker compared to less powerful boats in a gruelling singlehanded non-stop around the world race like the Vendee Globe. If they aren't noticably quicker then it seems likely that people won't try and recreate them in the future?

One of the most interesting aspects of the latest generation of boats is the number of contraptions being brought across from the powerboat world - reaching strakes, interceptors, planing boards, etc. This should be allowed in what is an 'Open' class, but sadly it seems that moves are afoot to limit this style of innovation. It has been proposed that appendages should be limited to seven for existing boats and to five for new builds (ie if boats have twin rudders, twin daggerboards and a canting keel then there is no room for them to have reaching strakes, interceptors, etc).

But the main issue that is likely to cause the IMOCA class to have a down turn is none of the above, but the fact that we are at the beginning of what could be the most severe global recession for many years. In this environment how many companies are seriously going to want to back yachting, even if it is what is certainly offshore sailing's most magnificent class?