Rick Tomlinson/Volvo Ocean Race
Fri 10 October 2008 15:30:5
Telefonica Blue skipper Bouwe Bekking believes the second generation of Volvo Open 70s have the potential to “easily” break the world 24-hour distance record during the leg one race to Cape Town.
ABN AMRO TWO sailed a whopping 562.96 nautical miles in the Southern Ocean during the second leg of the last race, but Bekking is confident that milestone could be eclipsed when the fleet begin the 6,500-nautical mile marathon on Saturday.
“I think it will be quite easy if we have reasonable conditions,” he said. “If you look at our VPPs (velocity prediction programs), and I’m just speaking, but if you have anything around 25 to 30 knots at the right angle I think the record will go quite easily on this leg.”
His thoughts were echoed by PUMA Ocean Racing skipper Ken Read, who refused to rule out the possibility of someone topping 600 miles in a day.
Read said: “It is condition dependant whether someone beats the record. Just on the way over here in 18 knot breezes we were knocking off 400-mile days easily. A lot of times it’s not the higher wind it’s the wave angle. If you have the right wave angle with the right sails up you can put some miles on it.
“I’d be surprised if the current record wasn’t knocked off, but to go 600 is hard. If 600 miles is attained there will be some frazzled nerves at the end of that day. It’s attainable, but you have to keep the boat in one piece. You have got to be smart.”
Meanwhile, Ericsson 4 skipper Torben Grael predicts this year’s race will be closer fought than the 2005-06 edition.
ABN AMRO ONE won by a massive 23 points in the last race - which was the first sailed in Volvo Open 70s - but Grael does not expect a repeat as designers have learnt the lessons from the previous lap.
He said: “The last race was in a new class of boats. It was new territory for everyone. ABN did a great job of getting a boat that was faster than everybody. The result was good for them and bad for the other teams.
“This time the designers have learnt what was good and what was not on the other race so the tendency is that the boats will be a lot closer in performance. It will make for a nicer and closer race.”
Despite the apparent closeness, members from all teams on the dock are pointing to Ericsson 4 as early favourites. The thinking is that the two-boat campaign - allied with the winning designer of the last race, the most preparation time and the hindsight of the last race – counts strongly in their favour, but Grael dismissed the tag.
“We don’t consider ourselves the favourites,” he said. “We have had good preparation and got the winning designer from last time, but you see from the in-port race that this is going to be tight.
“There are a lot of teams that have prepared very well for this race, which is not like last time where a couple of teams had a lot more time than others.”
Bekking and his crew are also expected to be among the frontrunners – they won both of the opening in-port races – but he is not writing off anybody, including Ger O’Rourke’s Team Delta Lloyd, which was last in the water and uses the old ABN AMRO ONE boat.
“It will be really interesting to see how much faster the new generation boats are than the old boats,” he said.
“We have been doing some tank testing on a similar hull that the ABN had and we can still see that that boat is having some strengths in certain areas where we really will have to work hard to even keep up with them. The whole fleet will be very close.”
Of course, as Green Dragon skipper Ian Walker said: “No one knows what will happen.”
And his counterpart on Telefonica Black, Fernando Echavarri, concurred: “We will know a lot more a week from now. We have all got boats we are happy with and crew we are happy with, but no one knows.”
“Anything we say right now is speculation,” added Andreas Hanakamp of Team Russia. “We can make educated guesses, but no one has really learnt anything. We have had an inshore race, but no one has raced anyone offshore just yet.”
It is a situation that has driven the sailors and their teams stir crazy. This race has been more than two years in the planning, with a lot of late nights, paranoia, training and graft. Very soon it will be evident who made the best use of their time and the teams will breathe a sigh of relief just because the show is finally on the road.
As Read said: “We have loved Alicante, but we can’t wait to leave it in our rear-view mirror. Let’s go sailing. It’s why we’re here.”
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