Is there any chance that he can deliver something on par with the top boats?

No way..! He is too Farr behind the program.! Both Farr and RP will be the designers with the fastest boats, it gets down to databases of boat after boat, each time around the potential to make them faster is greatly improved with the feedback coming in from all the boats. I don't think you can just step up to the plate 1st time round and deliver something as fast as the latest generation from Farr and RP. Both of these designers have delivered results in TP52 racing.

Will be tough, but possible.

Interesting that JC went back to the family well for this. One wonders if there is a little bit of wanting something different, so if you win, you can say your guys are great AND you had the foresight to choose Mani. And if you dont win, you can put it off to Mani's first shot at the class.

All accounts are that JC wants to be competitive- will be fun to see- but would be more fun to sail!!

What's the latest hi perf boat from Frers? Anything since the VO60?

volvo 60? which one? other than that americas cup boats...

thought one of Daltons 60's was a Frers and one a Farr. could be hallucinating again though.

We have a winner.

If i remember correctly Dalton came into the game late so figured that his farr boat would not be as fast as the rest of the fleet, a lack of testing/tuning etc. So used a different designer, frers, for the 2nd, hoping to get a farr beater. unfourtinatly it wasnt so Dalton raced the Farr and the girls raced the Frer's.

But it ain't you.



Wrong, Dalton raced the Frers boat = Amer Sports One.

Hi,

for what its worth, it was actually the other way round, the girls took the Farr and GD the Frers.

yes correct - had forgotten that... Men raced the frers - figured they did not have time to get as optimised as other farrs so took a risk.

Forget Frers I checked out the Transpac52 site www.transpac52.org and there are some designers I have never even heard of. I believe many of these new designers include some well known VPP and Fluid dymanics guys from the AC as part of their teams, so it seems there are new designers popping up everywhere, which is great to see.

J. Jaudenes/Theys
Botin & Carkeek

If owners are commissioning these guys I have no problem with Frers being commissioned..!

A more precise phrase would be 'GD took the Frers and the girls got whatever he left behind'.

A twist to that story was that Dalton once claimed that was he ever beaten by the girls (skippered by Lisa McDonald, Neal's wife) he would walk naked up he streets of Auckland with a pineapple up his ***.

Well, as a matter a fact on the last leg from Göteborg to Kiel the girls did beat Daltons boat. At the finish Dalton was handed a pineapple, stripped off to his underpants and put the unfortunate fruit in its rightful setting. Not quite as he promised, but somewhat close.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but haven't B&C been producing quite a lot of winning IMS boats for the Med circuit ?? I seem to recall that all of their IMS boats are 55' plus...

looks like i dont remember correctly then. oh well maybe next time

What would it take/at point would you trust/hire a designer?

how much rep? results? background in non racing? crazy cool new ideas?

You are not wrong regarding the B&C fame in IMS.

Their fame however mainly originated from the IMS600 class, i.e. 40-42 foot boats: Sinergia 40, Grand Soleil 42R etc.
And most (all?) are rule beaters to the extreme (including internal ballast and hollow or wooden keels for a high CoG !!), relatively slow for the size, but safe bets on corrected time. They are cleaning up IMS600 at the Copa Del Rey right now.

To B&C's defense it has to be said that they state that the IMS rule sucks.

Marcelino Botin is part of the design team for Team Shosholoza, the South African Americas Cup team.
Correction: It's Emirates Team New Zealand. Doesn't get much better does it ?

they designed talismen, no? and i vote no i dont think the first frers boat will see the podium, but the second or third....if they get the commission

Sure, it is now a long time Frers has not been commissioned an out and out racing boat.
Still ,Victory nearly (bar the jury) won the last act of the AC in Valencia, and after all Dalton was not far from it in the VOR.
Frers must also have a lot of CFD and VPP material from two excellent AC campaigns with Il Moro (I am sure) and the first Luna Rossa(I believe) both winners of the LV Cup.
So : he could well be in the fray

PS : New designers
I do not think B&C are involved with Sosholoza but with a much bigger campaign.

The Ed must be pleased to know that Frank Pong has ordered a TP52 from ..........Juan K

Sorry so are you saying Farr haven't done any tank testing for their TP52 designs, I think they have.

And to continue on the last point,

any computational analysis, CFD, needs to be backed up with experimental data, aka tow tank testing or circulation tunnel testing, to prove that the simulation you set up is ok, if not your results are bogey....and cant be trusted.

new TP52 commission from Frank Pong. Here are two brief excerpts.)

So far the latest crop of TP52s in Europe have included designs from Farr
Yacht Design (Caixa Galicia, Aifos, Bribón, Atalanti, Bambakou, Siemens),
Bottin & Carkeek (Movistar, Orlanda-Olympus, Balearia), Judel/Vrolijk
(Cristabella) and Reichel-Pugh (Lexus, Patches). This is in addition to
designers Alan Andrews, Grant Davidson, Brett Bakewell-White, Nelson-Marek
and Jim Donovan who also have older generation TP52s built. New to this
inter-yacht design house challenge comes Valencia-based Juan Kouyoumdjian
with a new TP52 for Hong Kong-based owner Frank Pong. Kouyoumdjian has
previously designed Pong's radical 115 footer, Maiden Hong Kong.

In a class where there seems to be very little in the way of significant
difference between boats other than waterline beam and appendages, the Juan
K design looks very different with some ABN AMRO 1-like features such as a
very slight reverse angle to the bow and ... chines? The designer says
'doing something different' is now becoming expected of him by his clients:
"With TP52s you have two types of owner: You have the owners who like to
buy the standard package and make the difference by having Coutts or Cayard
on board and then you have the owners who want the boat itself to make the
difference. I usually get contacted by the second group - never the first
one! I either have to say them 'right we play this game like this and these
are the risks' or we have to tell them go and get a Farr boat. But
sometimes they don't want to go and get a Farr boat..."

Designers just need a chance to compete and that only comes with someone that is willing to go for something different and take the chance.

Look at the VO70's don jones how many has he done? but warro has taken a chance on him

Also you might get a boat designed a bit cheaper if the designer needs to show his stuff in an emerging design rule ie canters, TP52's VO70's etc etc

Hey if you're JC and you have the money, why not try something new? If I could afford 2 TP52's in a season, I'd try different designers too.

So, you're JC, you already have a boat that SHOULD be fast, why not can the crew and start over there first??? No sense building another boat if your guys can't make em go

Ed's fulla shit. Mani Frers has been designing fast boats since before Bruce Farr was losing his virginity to sheep in NZ. His VO60 boat was pretty good IIRC and his Swedish boat in the last AC was pretty decent. If you go with Farr you will have the same boat as all the other guys with Farrs. Do you see any advantage there? Do you think that those IMS abortion specialists (B&C) or Juan Kouyou-what'shisname has anything on Frers? It's not like a TP52's some kind of out there boat like an Open 60.

BTW which boat was Ed talking about anyway? (Bambakou?) I would think the "the former fastest boat" was not Med optimized to of course it's going to be slow in the Med. My thinking is that if any of these Euros take their Med optimized boats out of the Med then they'll get their asses handed to them. I wonder if any of these Med boats are going to do the Fastnet or KWRW or any sailing in locations outside of the Med.

Dalton said the same thing during the 98' Whitbread about Merit or whatever the 60' he had was called. So twice he chose the slower boat for the global course?