The path forward

Farr Yacht Design President, Pat Shaughnessy shares his thoughts on Foncia's win and the future of IMOCA Open 60s

Pat Shaughnessy, President of Farr Yacht Design, is keen to offload a fact of which his firm is justifiably proud: in the 2008-9 Vendee Globe their designs led for 97% of the race. Whether it is good or bad, we can’t say, but the lead was tossed around between not one but four of their designs - initially Loick Peyron’s Gitana Eighty, then Seb Josse’s BT, Jean-Pierre Dick’s Paprec Virbac 2 before Michel Desjoyeaux’s Foncia took over for the latter half of the race ultimately clinching victory 5 days 6 hours ahead of the next boat, the biggest margin since Christophe Auguin’s win in the 1996-7.

So in Shaughnessy’s opinion why did Desjoyeaux win? “I think he was trying harder. I think all of the boats are still being used at something like 60-70% of their capacity and I think he was using more of his than other people were using theirs. A lot of it is the man, but if you have a boat that is well set up, that’s balanced and kindly, then the autopilots can use more of the boat’s potential. Then there is a fair amount of risk assessment – how hard am I willing to push the platform? How much do I trust the thing I have? I think probably he had some weather breaks helping to get back in there and after that I think he pushed pretty hard to get back into contention. Then he stayed with the pack for a while and then he decided when he wanted to press on a bit…”

Shaughnessy also thinks that Desjoyeaux was well matched to his boat. “Everyone is talking about whether boats should be big and powerful or small and light, and I think what the race has demonstrated is that each person has an ideally paired amount of power and a platform that they can use effectively. And probably Michel has got something that is very well suited to him or maybe he could have something even more powerful.”

Before the start of the race, we compared the Vendee Globe with the Grand National, the implication being that in addition to the variety of attributes skippers must have - from racing ability, tactics, meteo, routing, the ability to keep one’s boat together and oneself together, etc etc, - there is a large amount of luck involved in getting to the finish line and getting there first. “I’m sure someone like Michel will tell you it wasn’t about luck - it was about attention to detail and planning. Of course there is a certain amount of outside influence, things that you hit or stuff like that that can look like luck, but generally the people that put lots of hard work and careful planning into things reap the benefit of that. If we ran it 100 times, I’m sure the cream would rise to the top.”

Farr only entered the IMOCA Open 60 game prior to the 2004-5 Vendee Globe with Jean-Pierre Dick’s Paprec Virbac 1 (now Bernard Stamm’s Cheminees Poujoulat, which pulled out of this Vendee Globe initially with rudder bearing problems before being washed on to the Kerguelen Islands in a gale). Shaughnessy says that the developments over this boat with their latest generation has been huge, although he is reluctant to quantify this.

“We have numbers, yes! The thing about the numbers is that they never look quite right when you look at a race. Our experience across a number of Volvo developments, looking at the VO60s for instance, it was very easy to make an incremental hour improvement, say a 10 hour improvement, around the world in a design sense that would produce a day’s worth of improvement on the race course. We are still see enormous jumps and after the R&D work for the Volvo race [with Team Telefonica] we were pretty confident we could do an Open 60 that was a massive improvement without even researching again. We still think there is a lot to wring out of them – there are huge improvements to come.”

So will all the boats in 2012 be that much bigger, all like Artemis and Bahrain Team Pindar? “I don’t think the answer is necessarily big, I think it is in the correct pairing for the person. I think there is somebody that can win a race in a smaller, less powerful boat and someone who can win in a big grunty boat. It really is about the pairing and when that person is able to get 100% out of their boat, they will do better than someone else on another boat going at 90%. It is just not that simple that there is one right answer, and I think that gets overlooked when people talk about a trend towards big powerful boats. The race wasn’t won by those big powerful boats that everyone was worried about. I don’t think it is the sky falling sort of scenario that was painted at the start.”

Something that will have the Farr boffins back in Annapolis scratching their heads is why of their seven boats (including six new ones) in this race, that only one finished.

Two of their boats which led the race - Jean-Pierre Dick’s Paprec Virbac 2 and Seb Josse’s BT - had to pull out with rudder damage. “I think the kick-up rudder arrangements on our boats seemed to suffer a bit after they kicked up, and in a case when they didn’t fully come out of the water, they had some loading in a partially kicked up state that was greater than what we anticipated,” says Shaughnessy. “Certainly we were trying to support them in that situation, but obviously there is some work to do there to support them in that partially kicked up state.”

Most of Farr boats had kick-up rudders slotted into their transom scoops. The exceptions were the sisterships Paprec Virbac 2 and Gitana Eighty, fitted with transom-hung rudders, necessitated because both boats had trim tabs/planning boards beneath their transoms. In this case the rudders were fitted with their own individual end plates. “They work,” says Shaughnessy. “JP [Dick - Paprec Virbac 2] made it all the way around the world in the Barcelona race and they worked fine. I don’t think they are far from being right.”

As to the trim tabs, Shaughnessy definitely reckons this is the way forward. “It makes perfect sense that you should be trimming your boat with means other than water ballast, because that adds so much displacement to achieve the similar trim effect that your explicit acceleration is hampered by carrying all the extra weight.” He reckons they would be perfect on VO70s too, although this may not fit in with Knut Frostad's vision to half campaign costs.



In the Vendee Globe, several boats, such as Mike Golding’s Ecover 3, had an alternative to the Farr trim tab in the form of an interceptor - a drop down plate at the back of the boat. But Shaughnessy reckons that the trim tab arrangement works in a greater range of sailing conditions than the interceptor. He says they haven’t carried out that much research into it, but there is a huge amount of data available from the power boat/commercial shipping world, that they have poured over. “It is just trying to find the right way to do it. When we looked at trim tabs one of the things you worry about is - ‘is this another control that the sailor can understand and implement?’ And if he has this wrongly positioned, are there more bads than goods? There are plenty of days when you think that these boats just need less moving parts, that that would be a good thing. There is some goodness in Foncia’s simplicity.”

And yet Foncia wasn’t fitted with them. Shaughnessy points out that the sisterships PRB and Foncia were designed before they had convinced themselves of the merits of this powerboat technology. “We don’t think that the way we implemented the trim tabs is necessarily the best way to do it. But we think that some sort of controllable hull shape is correct for the boats, so that they have some variable geometry that allows them to orient themselves to upwind or downwind or reaching conditions. The goal for us is to try and create that in a light, easy to use way. Our first attempt at it is still a bit heavy and a bit difficult to use for the guys. But that is the right path.”

Assuming the rule stays much the same, Shaughnessy reckons that appendages and the added movable parts beneath the hull, will remain the key area of development in the next Vendee Globe cycle.

Already the Farr twin asymmetric daggerboards differ from their competitors in being more upright in the boat (ie providing more lift when the boat is heeled). “The vertical lifting force component when the boat is heeled is keeping the bow up when it is high speed reaching - we still believe that is correct,” says Shaughnessy. “Most of the work that we did in this last generation was really refinement, so it is plan form sizing and foil section and work around refinement of concept rather than exploring completely new things. We did a lot of work on plan form shape in the Volvo boats and there’s a lot of room for improvement there in the situation where you are willing to have doors to cover your openings in the hull - so having tapered boards.”

And the step on from here is an obvious one… Ultimately Shaughnessy believes [without prompting from us] that the IMOCA Open 60s could go through a Moth-style revolution. “Maybe not in this next generation of boats, but I think you can look on the horizon and see that foil-born craft aren’t that far-fetched and that amount of development will be night and day in terms of getting between here and there.” You want carnage? We’ll give you carnage.

Many of the Farr 60s (although not Desjoyeaux’s Foncia) were retrofitted with reaching strakes around their bow just above the water. Would they fit those again? “I think there are better ways to do that. We would have liked to have done that in a different way on the Open 60s, but the time where we were bringing it to the teams, we were reacting as quickly as we could. It was certainly less than ideal how they were fitted and how they were positioned and understood. Again, like the trim tabs – in a very simple analogy, there aren’t too many power boats that would have a planning hull without them. They are features that can work and for sure there are challenges with them because we have a hull that is heeling and operating in a number of different heels and trims, so it is a difficult problem to understand, but the trades off indicate they are valuable.”

They were fitted the strakes because their boats were nose-diving a bit? “I think all the boats nose-dive a bit, I don’t think that is a boat specific thing. We weren’t specifically trying to address heavy air nose-diving. We were trying to promote a bow-up reaching attitude which would allow the bigger sails to be carried further up in the range and there is a very large transition between a masthead reaching sail and a fractional reaching sail which we think is largely about the luff of the sail rotating with the vertical lifting force which is lifting the whole boat. And if you can change the attitude of the boat and stay in those sails longer and provide more flexibility within a specific sail, then those are the kinds of things that are key to the development of these boats. The sail inventory is looking at becoming more limited so every sail you have, you have to be able to stretch further across your sailing range.”

As to whether new rules need to be written in an attempt to prevent similar carnage in the future, Shaughnessy thinks it is unlikely and the teams should be left to get their own individual houses in order. “It is not something you can write a rule to fix. I think the majority of the failures are fairly easy to understand. All of the designers, the builders, the sailors - no one wants to have a failure and exit the race. We don’t need a rule to tell us to keep the mast on the boat. We want the mast to stay on the boat... Those are failures that everyone is trying to resolved, but they are all quite varied and certainly the only boat that had a capsize, that recovered with its keel was BT which did exhibit a re-righting capability that was quite close to an AVS worst case scenario and did provide a safe re-righting.”

He says that prior to the Vendee Globe, IMOCA became fixated on trying to be seen to improve the safety aspect of the Open 60 rule and were looking at AVS numbers. “In reality the kinds of failures you see on the race course are rarely to do with that kind of a safety problem. I’m not sure that they are the right places to start looking – water ballast and AVS. But the class is under a lot of pressure to show something that looks like an improvement and on paper they look like safety improvement, but it is not a problem they have.”

So watch out for the Farr foiling IMOCA 60…but no time soon sadly.

More photos on the following pages...