Sweet… Infiniti 46R Maverick

En del riktigt coola lösningar. Mer nördiga inredningssekvenser här.

Jag har ju varit lite skeptiskt till Dynamic Stability System (DSS), då man har haft sparsamma framgångar med Infinit 36 och på one-off-båtar. Wild Oats och några andra har kört det, och det har gett bra effekt i vissa förhållanden.

När man lanserade Infiniti 46 så var det spännande att se om man hade kommit vidare, men de initiala resultaten (med en amatörbesättning) var inte bra. Jag jämförde bland annat med ClubSwan 42:

St. Tropez – Giraglia – Genova: Infiniti 46 var 2.5% snabbare med IRC 22.9% högre.
Palermo – Monte Carlo: 1.9% och 5.2% snabbare med ORC rating 22.6% högre.

Men under Middle Sea Race klev Stu Bannatyne ombord och då fick man ordning på det och spikade Class 1.

Boat Name Boat Type Class TCC Elapsed Time Corrected Time
MASCALZONE LATINO Cookson 50 Class 2 1.37 d3 h3 m8 s3 d4 h6 m56 s1
CIPPA LIPPA 8 Cookson 50 Class 2 1.364 d3 h7 m59 s11 d4 h13 m6 s5
MAVERICK Infiniti46R Class 1 1.414 d3 h6 m14 s27 d4 h14 m37 s57
FOGGY DEW JPK 10.10 Class 6 1.003 d4 h14 m22 s44 d4 h14 m42 s36
CARO Botin 65 Class 1 1.471 d3 h3 m47 s52 d4 h15 m29 s54
WILD JOE RP 60 Class 1 1.496 d3 h2 m34 s4 d4 h15 m33 s12
AEGIR Carbon ocean82 Class 1 1.499 d3 h2 m45 s51 d4 h16 m4 s17
AUDAX ENERGIA TP-52 Class 2 1.37 d3 h9 m51 s59 d4 h16 m9 s25
ARTIE J122 Class 5 1.085 d4 h8 m9 s37 d4 h17 m0 s50
TRIFORK VOR 70 Class 1 1.688 d2 h18 m59 s45 d4 h17 m5 s20

Notera ratingen, 1.414 (motsvarar väl 1.77 i gamla SRS), där man skall vara snabbare än TP52.

Även under RORC Transatlantic Race gjorde man bra ifrån sig. Dock med lite mindre motstånd.

Aragon Marten 72 Nicolas Lecarpentier 12 – 23:17:03 1.456 18 – 21:13:47
Maverick Infiniti 46 R Oliver Cotterell 13 – 18:52:09 1.414 19 – 11:50:56
Leopard Farr 100 Mike Slade 10 – 19:22:37 1.806 19 – 12:26:05
Stay Calm Swan 82 S Stuart Robinson 14 – 07:02:17 1.386 19 – 19:27:03
Sensation Class 40 – Seconde Chance Sabrosa 40 Mk2 Lepesqueux/Pellecuer 16 – 03:12:13 1.241 20 – 00:31:11
Nemesis Swan 45 James Heald 2H 18 – 15:42:47 1.136 21 – 04:36:07
Path Baltic 112 Anatoli Karatchinski 14 – 09:42:57 1.603 23 – 02:10:57
Challenger Whitbread 60 Chris Stanmore-major 17 – 03:12:37 1.374 23 – 13:00:11
Pata Negra Lombard IRC46 Giles Redpath 1.172 DNF-Did Not Finish

Det skall bli spännande att se vad man kan uträtta under Caribbean 600.

Oliver Cottrell (Boat Captain)

Born and grew up on cruising boat, after university I worked on superyachts and did a lot of instruction. I met Quentin Stewart, the owner, when training personnel for the 13-14 Clipper Round the World Yacht Race. He ended up on my yacht (OneDLL, finished 3rd overall) for the legs from South Africa to Australia, and around Australia including the Hobart. He enjoyed the raced and asked if next time we could do it on a fast boat! I thought he was joking.

The boat splashed in January and we have probably had six sails on her since then. We are still scratching the surface in terms of what the boat can do, ironing out kinks. Fundamentally she has shown us that the technology is incredible, very high average boat speeds in the right conditions. The foil works exceptionally well at reducing the wetted surface area, creating a very stable platform to operate on.

She is unlike anything I have sailed before, given how easily she manages to get up to high boats speeds and stay there. It is not like surfing, she happily sits at speed. You have to rethink how you trim the boat. When she sits on the foil the bow comes out the water, so unlike a traditional boat where you move aft to help this, actually you have to move forward to above the centre of lift near the keel and foils. Any crew thinking about adopting this technology will have to go out and experience it, and change the way they sail.

There is a huge amount of potential.

It is not a safe project to be involved in, but I got involved because the owner had very clear ideas about wanting to try something new. Our investigations into the opportunities was very detailed, and we soon came to the conclusion that you can spend an awful lot of money making something go a fraction quicker, but there was this new technology sitting on the fringes and showed promise. I was lucky he was willing to take a punt on it. We sailed the Infiniti 36, spoke to Hugh Welborn and spoke to Gordon Kay and started to really believe in the technology. This boat is showing that it will be the technology that monohulls adopt in the future. The other thing that attracted me was the ethos of the owner to give younger guys a chance. We’re not well known and this is quite a boat to take on requiring a lot of work and a lot of learning, but that’s part of the challenge.

Quentin Stewart (Owner)

I did the Rolex Sydney Hobart in 2013, and the experience confirmed to me that it was better better having a faster boat than a slower boat and that life might be more fun at 20 knots rather than 8 knots. I started looking at buying something that would give that experience. After a while we came to the conclusion that there was an opportunity to do something completely different for an offshore racing boat rather than going with an old TP52 or a Cookson 50 and trying to modify it. I was persuaded that building something from scratch that did the job it was designed to do was a better answer. We ended up the Infiniti 46 race boat.

I believe a lot of my business life was innovative in the field we were involved with, and was about assessing risk and taking a view on return versus the risk being taken. For me a lot the the things we have done with this boat with the DSS system, the canting keel and rig has been about making an assessment of the risk in terms of whether it would or wouldn’t work and the performance gains. They seemed fairly obvious trade-offs. I believe the risk of the technology not working compared to the upside we can achieve in performance to be very low.

The design brief we gave Hugh Welborn was very clear. We wanted a very fast 46-foot boat and we did not want to compromise. It is a raceboat through and through, built exactly as Hugh wanted it to achieve significant mileage offshore.

The programme for the boat is to spend the summer in the Med finishing with the Rolex Middle Sea Race in October, then the RORC Transatlantic from Lanzarote in November, the the RORC Caribbean 600, Voiles de Saint-Barths, back to the UK for Cowes and the Rolex Fastnet in 2017, and then the plan is to take the boat down to Australia to the Rolex Sydney Hobart. A full programme for the next 18 months.

Part of building the boat was about saying this I something completely different. I wanted people who would treat it as something new as opposed to ‘it’s a slightly different Volvo 70 or IMOCA 60’. I didn’t want that mentality. What I’ve sought to do is give some younger people a chance to develop their racing skills on what should be a high performance piece of equipment that they would not necessarily otherwise be able to access. Part of the philosophy of the whole programme has been to work with people and suppliers who actually buy into design and opportunity rather than people who want to come up with a plain vanilla answer. I wanted people who were prepared to be open minded who didn’t have any preconceptions. We have a young crew who have sailed a lot of miles, albeit not on this type of boat, but then nobody has! They work hard, they are willing to learn. We then bring on people like Stu Bannatyne, Gordon Kay from Infiniti, Justin Ferris from Doyle Sails. They will help the younger guys to develop into the best sailors they can be. Very much a centre part of the programme is to give these young guys a chance to develop their skills.

My hope is that this boat might represent something of the future for say, the IMOCA fleet. Rather than retrofit, to simply design the boat around the foiling. The hull shape is fundamentally different which is probably the most obvious thing. Maybe the next iteration of the Volvo will see those boats move to a more high-performance set up as well. If that vision turns out to be right these guys will be light years ahead. I’ve taken a view on the future and I may be wrong or right. If I’m right we will have taken giant strides. We could have taken smaller steps, but incrementalism in sport in my view has become too much of a watchword. My view is if you are going to do something break the mould and try something completely different. You might turn out to have had no foresight and turn out to be a total idiot but if it works everyone else is playing catch up and following. I don’t think we’ve taken a giant risk for what are giant performance gains. I hope we can demonstrate that over the next two years and that this will become so obvious that everyone else will decide they should go along with it. That’s how we started and that’s how we intend to conduct ourselves.

Gordon Kay, Infiniti Yachts (Builder)

The key thing that makes this boat completely revolutionary is Dynamic Stability Systems. The foils that we use to make the boat more powerful, to make her lighter and make the boat have a lot less drag when she sails through the water.

When we started the design process for the boat we start with the foils. This means everything on the boat is going to be lighter. We have a keel that cants, swinging from one side to the other to give us extra power. What you see is a boat that is extraordinarily quick for its length – a determining factor in a lot of yachts – it’s a boat that creates a huge amount of power reducing the drag all the time so the boat accelerates very quickly, it doesn’t heel very much and it just sails faster the stronger the wind gets.

It was revolutionary when we invented it. It’s now more evolutionary, so we have established over the past ten years that these foils work with the retro fits that we’ve done to famous big yachts like Wild Oats XI, but this is the first time we have a proper ocean going offshore yacht where the foils were designed as the core and the DNA of the design. Previously boats have always retro-fitted, so they’ve got good and expected benefits, but now we’re getting a much greater benefit from the foils because they are right there at the beginning of the design.

Already in trials we’ve seen 25 knots of boat speed sailing in 20 knots of wind with just the jib. Typically we are seeing speeds 5, 6, 7, 8 knots faster than a classic boat of the same length, with the same mission profile. She is a pocket rocket, which was the brief.

The faster you go the more effective the foils become. So if you are sailing upwind, close hauled we get some nice benefits in pitch reduction, heel reduction and the boat is quick for its length. It’s when you start reaching that the foils really just kick in and give a massive turbo afterburner, and off we go. It also makes for a much more comfortabke ride, because the pitch is massively reduced and the heel is too. Instead of sailing along at 30 degrees of heel angle, we have a boat that is relatively narrow and we don’t heel very much because of the foils.

It’s all about how you create power in a yacht. Yachts are all about power and weight just the same as cars. We achieve our power through foils as opposed to a very wide beam and very heavy keel. Both add power but they also add weight. Our solution adds power without weight.

Yacht design is all about power and weight. The alchemy of the process is how you combine them. In strong winds you want a powerful heavy boat with a wide hull form and lots of stability. But when the wind drops that’s all drag and you don’t have a very competitive boat in light winds. We have a boat that is extremely competitive in light winds because the boat is a little bit narrower, significantly lighter because we haven’t had to add a big heavy keel weight. In stronger winds the foil begins to create your power and the faster you go the more power you’ve got.

On Maverick we have a twin foil system with one foil on each side, so you put the foil out before it’s in the water and then you tack or gybe onto the foil, so the load is very very low and you can pull them in or out with a piece of rope. On Wild Oats the foil is a transverse system and the loads are quite high, and we have atrack system. There is going to be a hydraulic push button system. The key point to remember is that when the foil is under load you are using it so you generally don’t want to move it.

It feels like a boat 15 or 20 feet bigger. It’s not just the speed and the acceleration, it is the incredible stability and balance of the platform. Stability is great because it makes you feel secure. The more stable you are the less chance there is of anything going wrong. ON most yachts the faster you go the less stable you become. For us it is the opposite.

The Giraglia Rolex Cup is the perfect test bed for us. It’s a classic and best of all you can have any weather conditions. You can have a Mistral, you can have upwind, you can have light airs, which for us is perfect, since we want to be the ultimate all-rounder. It doesn’t matter what conditions you have the boat is always going to perform. And if you want a race where you can get every condition imaginable it is the Giraglia Rolex Cup. It’s very challenging. Having Maverick here taking part in its first regatta, its first race, we could not ask for a better environment. It’s a great place to set up and to test, and then when you compete it is against a couple of hundred boats. We’re very early in the development of the boats so what more could we need.

The great thing about DSS foils is that speed is your friend. The bigger the boat the more natural speed or pace it has, so the more effective the foils become . At 46 feet our results are in line and even exceeding expectations. When we move up to 60, 70, 80 feet there doesn’t seem to be much of a limit. It is one of the few things in naval architecture where size is your friend.

It is an epic boat to sail, you cannot believe you have done what you’ve done on a boat of 46 feet.

Post Race
On the last leg of the Giraglia Rolex Cup we were regularly sailing between 20 and 25 knots in complete control. We started with the biggest masthead spinnaker. When we got to 25 knots of boat speed we thought it wise to put up a smaller sail and still did 23, 23 knots in complete control. Water was flying everywhere. It was fantastic.

We’ve learnt that the boat is quick, really fast. When we found ourselves sailing alongside anyone else we had speed and pace and we are happy with that. We learnt of course that the Giraglia Rolex Cup is very challenging race and it is not just about having a fast boat. It requires preparation and you have to make smart decisions. The race always poses challenges like parking at the Giraglia, which we did with no dignity at all as 20 boats sailed past us! Local knowledge is king, especially in the light. We came into the rock having just past Kuka Lite, we were sailing quickly all very happy and then we parked. They left us for dead partly because they’ve done the race a number of times and mainly because they made a good decision.

The Giraglia Rolex Cup has been very challenging but certainly rewarding. It is only when you put yourself up against other boats and compare yourself that you learn. We achieved more in the race that we could have in months of training and testing. It was a fast forward path. Technically we are very happy. The operating systems worked. The team work and crew work was very good. We had probably half the crew of a comparable sized boat, so we had to work very hard.