Back in business

After a three year hiatus, Whitbread legend Ludde Ingvall returns to ocean racing

Back in the bad old days of the Whitbread Race, Finland was a significant player in the classic fully crewed round the world race. In the first event we covered in 1989-90 there were three Finnish boats competing, among them the giant maxi Union Bank of Finland - a sloop when the winning boats were ketches - skippered by one Ludde Ingvall.

For more than a decade now Ingvall has been based in Sydney where given his ocean racing credentials he was a regular feature of the Boxing Day flight south to Hobart, claiming line honours in both 2000 and 2004. Unfortunately his last bid to compete in 2006 came to disaster when his former Nicorette, renamed Diabetes at the time, dismasted during training prior to the start. Since then it has been all quiet on the Western front.

So why has Ludde been away? "There are a number of reasons as always," he told thedailysail. “I basically left because I needed to spend some time with my family. I realised, as you do when you live the lives we live, that I have three daughters and they are all growing up and sure enough they are all moving away. So I took a break to focus on what they want to do, which is all to do with horses and riding. So I built an equestrian centre on the north outskirts of Sydney and my middle daughter, Dominique, is hoping to make the London Olympics in eventing. So she is on the shortlist to ride for Finland, which is all good.

“I also had a few issues to deal with. My father passed away, which I took quite hard. And my mum got cancer, had a stroke and then she’s gone deaf. And I had a couple of issues myself where I had to have a tent put into my heart, due to a genetic problem. That kept me away, but at the same time after four years of shovelling horse manure and being bossed around by my girls I thought it was time to get back into a sport or a place where someone actually respects me!"

There having been several years passed since we last interviewed Ludde, we had forgotten what a human dynamo he is. His spoken word rate exceeds that of even Mark Turner...and they are strangely aligned, being two of the greatest marketeers within our sport.

Without losing flow, Ingvall launches into his views on where the supermaxi class is going: “I was quite disappointed that the yacht racing rules changed to being a free-for-all, no limit, because I think it is bad for the sport and I think the timing was terrible in relation to the global financial crisis. What we have ended up with is an arms race between guys with a hell of a lot of money making it impossible to deal with for people like Grant [Wharington] and Sean [Langman] and myself. These guys can out-spend us on everything, all the time. We can’t even be clever, because we don’t have the money to even make a rating certificate as high as what the other guys have got. That has been one of my big worries. I usually draw the analogy that if you did this in Formula One, you would have no more than two or three racing teams left and the rest would pack up and go home. Those are my irritations. At the same time – that hasn’t made any difference. We are looking at what is going to be the biggest supermaxi gathering ever on one starting line and I thought I just want to be part of that..."

Ingvall is certainly right, with the top supermaxis now more or less ignoring any handicap pretensions, although we suspect that most of their budget is going on new sails and crew salaries – as they would in any case.

In addition to merely competing in the Rolex Sydney Hobart, Ludde also has a dream with regard to how communication is handled during offshore yacht races (something else he shares with Turner).

"One of the things I have been waiting for a long time is to be able to manage what I call the ‘media bottle neck’. The Sydney Hobart race, the Fastnet Race, the transatlantic races, etc these are more adventures than yacht races and I think the strength of yachting is that it is the ultimate test of team work and one of the ultimate tests of leadership and it is a sport that transcends into adventure and when you talk adventure it is universal and global.

“One of the problems that we have always faced in my opinion is that the media always want to talk to the skipper or the owner, but there are 20 guys on my boat who all have a good story to tell. So the bottleneck is that I sit in front of journalists at a press conference, where there are only 10 or 15 of them, and the only story I can tell is my story or as good as I can, the story of the team. But some of the most exciting stories are of young people sailing supermaxis, or sailing a particular race and living the dream for the first time in their lives. I have been battling with how we can open this up and bypass this bottleneck. Of course the internet and the globality of that and adventure and the ability of people to use Twitter and Facebook and blogs, etc to get their stories out is something that I made a presentation to Microsoft in Europe about in 1997, that this is what is going to happen.

"So now we have set up a project where we have all the latest technology - we have got at the moment ADSL broadband on the boat pushing at 8MB/sec up to about 40-50 miles off the coast, which is fantastic. We are also installing the latest KVH Tracphone which is a back-up system to keep this interaction going."

Union Bank of Finland, if our memory serves us correctly, was the first boat in the Whitbread to carry an enormous Inmarsat A satcom voicecoms unit.

"Then we have created Twitter sites, Facebook and blogs and a website where people can join us and enjoy the adventure. I feel we are only scratching the surface, but the key to what we are doing is allowing every person in the team to tell their story to anybody in the global audience who wishes to hear. It is important – all the youngsters in my team they have their own dreams and ambitions can be fulfilled by learning how to create value and interest. If they can do that, they have a better chance of finding support and sponsors for whatever their dreams are. So I am doing whatever I can to coach them on the sailing side but also to make them understand what makes a professional team and how you can build up a good sponsorship package and create value and through that living your dream."

So during the Rolex Sydney Hobart, Ingvall’s yacht will be hooked up to the web 24/7 with a network of cameras providing a 'reality TV' type view of what is going on on board at any one moment (we seem to remember penning an April Fool earlier this year along these lines - whether the crews like it or not, this is definitely the future for following offshore/round the world races).

Since the wheels were only put in motion for this project two months ago, only around a third of his crew are youngsters. Another third are highly experienced while the remainder are what Ingvall dubs ‘technicians’, people with specialist knowledge whom he hopes will make the boat go faster.

Ingvall continues: “We put out a challenge to the world that we would like to be the first boat to be sailing with 500,000 virtual crew members. Whether we get there or not - that belongs to how the word is spread. We would like 500,000 to go to our sites and say ‘good luck, have a great race and we’ll be following your adventure’. Then we have a bunch of other things we want to do after that. If we are able to establish this connection with a global audience we will then be able to keep them involved to do whatever we want. Let’s say we want to do a transatlantic record or a speed record or whatever we can create our own event – we can communicate with our audience and the media whatever targets or objectives or dreams we are living. So we don’t necessarily need a Volvo Ovcean Race or a Sydney Hobart Race - all we need is that we are communicating the adventure and the dream we are living. I hope to achieve that by the end of February."

Ingvall won’t say any more about his plans post Hobart race, only that they will be announced mid-January and it is a program that will run for three years and is likely to see the boat visiting the US and Europe.

The program will certainly be in line with the objectives of his sponsors, the main one being YuuZoo. “A couple of friends of mine who have put together this mobile application company and it is going quite well, so they said why don’t we join in to use this as a platform to launch the brand in the Australasian market?" says Ingvall of this arrangement. He is on the YuuZoo board.

Meanwhile the boat, the Simonis Voogt-designed 90 footer has been taken out of mothballs. Since her dismasting in December 2006 until two months ago, she has literally remained on the hard doing nothing. Significantly Ingvall managed to secure a replacement mast from Pyewacket, belonging to the recently deceased Roy Disney.

“That is now quite pertinent," says Ingvall of his new spar’s lineage. “We put a little plaque on the mast ‘thanks Roy, fair winds – we are doing this for you’. I met Roy for the first time in 1988. He was a lovely guy, always friendly. When I was in Los Angeles I used to take him out for lunch. He told me the mast they have got, they aren’t using any more and was quite happy for me to have the rig. I bought the rig because it fitted straight into the boat. It was 4 inches shorter than the mast that I had, but with a slightly longer boom. It is a beautiful quality Hallspar rig, so I am quite happy about that."

Other than that Ingvall says the boat is much the same as it was in 2006. “When we launched in 2004 to do the Hobart, at the end of the day we didn’t get the systems running fully. So we are trying to get everything running the way the boat was designed to be. Of course it is very different from 2004 because then we had a lot less sail area. We weren’t allowed to cant the keel to more than 28 degrees. Now we cant to 55 - so it is the first time we are sailing with full power. So the downside is that we are 10ft shorter, but the benefit is that we are 10 tonnes lighter - we are 20 tonnes, they are 30 plus. So in terms sail power to weight and to wetted surface we are doing really well. Give us very light air or running conditions and we are probably very good. Power reaching we are lacking power and waterline. We have a full upgrade for the boat planned but just don’t have the cash to do and not the time."

Anyway even if Ingvall’s hopes of a third line honours victory in the Hobart race are slight, it is good to have back one of our sport's leading visionaries.

Follow Ingvall and his team's progress on Facebook, via their blog and on Twitter