How to win the Volvo Ocean Race pt1

James Boyd takes an in-depth look at John Kostecki's illbruck campaign

The victorious crew

As most Whitbread competitors were drawing breath after the last race finished, illbruck Challenge were already recruiting and by the end of 1998 had their core team of sailmaker Ross Halcrow, Stu Bannatyne, Mark Christensen and navigator Juan Vila signed up. "From then we slowly pieced together the team," explains Ross Halcrow. "When you're racing the Volvo you need people who have their own skill sets. So Crusty is a medic. Ray is a medic. Tony Kolb and Stu look after the engineering, the generators. Jamie Gale - hydraulics. Stu Bettany - the rig. Everyone had an area of responsibility in the general day to day maintainence, to make sure the boat keeps on operating."

Skipper John Kostecki says that it was unquestionably salaries that represented the bulk of their budget. This included enough crew to man the two EF boats as they were training and testing. Because of the length of the campaign they were also one of the few campaigns who paid to ship families out to stopovers during the race or wherever they were training.

Meteorologist Chris Bedford was also employed early to carry out a full meteorological study of the race course, to establish if there were any partcular set of conditions for which the boat should be optimised and to give some indication of what sails should be carried on each leg.

On the design side they went to Farr Yacht Design, despite Willi Illbruck's previous Pintas coming from the Judel/Vrolijk drawing board. But then Farr had designed every winning Volvo Ocean 60 to date. "Their philosophy was to win and not do something half-arsed," explains Steve Morris, senior designer and Vice president of Farr Yacht Design. Having had so much time carrying out R&D and on the water testing on the EF boats, the team had some fixed ideas about the direction they wanted to go in - a balls out reaching machine.

Farr carried out their own R&D, the cost of which was divided up between the campaigns, but illbruck commissioned Farr to go one stage further. "We were looking at the longitudinal centre of buoyancy, the heeled shape of the boat - trying to optimise that and how you get the drag down for more stability, how to get it to trim, how to go through waves properly," says Morris of the additional research they carried out. Morris says that in comparison to the other boats they carried out around one third more R&D on illbruck.

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