America’s Cup 1983: Wrong Horse For the Course

Australia II leads Liberty in the sixth race of the 1983 America’s Cup. Winning this race, Australia II tied the series at three races each. JH Peterson/ Outside Images

For the 1983 America’s Cup, our plan was to do two new boats and to trial them against each other. We already had two decent boats, Freedom and Enterprise, for comparison. We suspected that the Australians would be competitive and planning to do something special following their clever bendy rig in 1980. Don’t forget that the Americans had won forever, and the foreigners were predisposed to losing—which might not be fair, but I think it was realistic.

We thought that if we designed and built two new boats that we would have the landscape pretty well covered. We decided to have Johan Valentijn design one boat and Olin Stephens and his Sparkman & Stephens office design the other. The Valentijn boat, ironically, would not have been able to race in the Cup because it was too short on the waterline and didn’t fit the 12-Metre Rule.

For the S&S boat, Olin Stephens was getting older, so some others on the S&S team were probably involved, such as Bill Langan and the team behind him. They designed a fairly large boat. Normally, a large boat would be fighting for enough sail area, but they got it by pushing the girth profile pretty hard to gain back some rating under the 12-Metre Rule. It pushed the rule on girth hard. It was large, and the reason it did not have a smaller sail area was because the girths were not penalized. It was V-shaped and not wine-bottle-shaped. You would think with that configuration it would be slow, but it needed to be that way under the rule to get a large boat with a larger sail area.

We tested it against Freedom and Enterprise and realized that the design did not work well. We decided that we needed to either build another boat or rely on Freedom to be a good boat. We decided to have another boat designed and built, and based on some of the innovation that Valentijn had shown with his design of Magic, we let him do it. He designed Liberty, but it was not a great boat. 

The first day, we sailed Freedom against Liberty—mind you, I hate to go swimming, but I said I would go swimming because there must be something stuck on Liberty to be this slow against Freedom. So that did not bode well for our future.

We decided that we would also let Valentijn make changes to Freedom because she was sticky in the light air, and we thought that would improve with more sail area. We decided that we would let him make Freedom a little shorter so that we could add sail area. However, Freedom had the lowest freeboard of any 12-Metre, and that had been grandfathered in because the rule on freeboard was changed in 1983.

Freedom had a low ­freeboard and was quite wet, but it was the low freeboard that gave her better aerodynamic and hydrodynamic qualities. Valentijn did not interpret or misread the rule, so in making the boat shorter to gain sail area, we lost the grandfathering of the freeboard. We ended up with a shorter boat and without any additional sail area. It made Freedom worse in light air without added sail area, and worse in stronger conditions because it was shorter and it rated the same. So Valentijn designed Magic, which could not race for the Cup because its rating was too short; he designed Liberty, which was not a special boat; and he negatively impacted Freedom, which was our best boat after all of this. We ended up having to race Liberty.

In the meantime, the Australians had built two boats: One was Challenge 12 and the other Australia II. They were identical except one had a ­regular keel and one had a winged keel. The winged keel ended up being the better boat. It was the shortest boat you could design and still race, which, if I remember right, was 42½ feet on the waterline.

The problem with a small boat is that it isn’t very good in windier conditions. They figured out how to make it better by turning the keel upside down. They attached the short part of the keel to the hull and had the longer part at the bottom of the keel. That made a short boat with a lot of sail area very stable in the breeze. The tank testing was done in Holland and the idea came out of Holland, which made it illegal, but that’s another story.

The problem with the long keel at the bottom was that it made excess tip vortices—or, in layman’s terms, there was too much drag. They figured that if you added winglets to the keel, it would reduce the vortices. They started thinking that if you were going to add winglets with that drag, you might as well make them out of lead, which would give even more stability. And, if you were heeled over, one of the wings would be more vertical and add lift. So, for Australia, it was all a gain—aside from some additional drag downwind—but the boat was short and had plenty of sail area, so it was not that bad. 

The fact that we were up 3-1 after four races was a ­miracle. But it was a combination of them having some bad luck and not sailing well at the beginning and us having some good fortune. Once they figured out that they were fast, they became formidable. They got stronger and stronger, and John Bertrand got less nervous; they had a good crew and a good boat.

We broke down in the fifth race when the jumpers blew off the mast, which was too bad because those were our best conditions. They had good fortune in the sixth race and were faster. In the seventh race, we were kicking their butts—but the wind dropped quite a bit, and they got stronger and stronger and passed us.

Would I have done anything differently? Maybe knowing what I know now, but what I knew back then, probably not. They were a good boat.

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