Boats Are Fast, Not Built to Last

SAN DIEGO — Bill Koch might be alarmed by the fragility of the new International America’s Cup Class boats, but one designer says it’s part of the program.

“The boat that breaks up one second after crossing the finish line is the right one,” Heiner Meldner said Tuesday. “The one that is still together is overdesigned.”

Meldner, a former weapons designer associated with the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory and NASA, was the connection with Hercules Aerospace, where Koch had his Jayhawk boat built in secret. The next one will come this summer from the conventional Goetz boat yard in Rhode Island and will represent the next, or third, generation in development.

It’s no problem to build an unbreakable boat, Meldner said. But the lighter they are, the faster they are. The stronger they are, the heavier--and slower.

“If somebody has built a truck that will hold up in 20 or 25 knots (of wind), it will just sit in the water at 6 or 7 knots,” Meldner said. “At 6 knots, you need to be ultra-light to move. If I set myself up (to prevent) breakage, it would result in drastic losses at the low (wind) end.

“Later on, as the racing for the Cup gets closer, everybody has to be more conservative, so it’s a correct approach to do all the dangerous things now and get all the risks out of the way. I’ve been in dozens of these racing programs, and the opposite philosophy has always failed.”

“Dangerous”--actually, “incredibly dangerous”--that’s how Koch described the boats. Meldner suggests that isn’t entirely true.

“Most people will do the right thing--go light and see what breaks,” he said, “then beef it up in those spots and leave all the other spots alone.”

The breakage, Meldner said, generally has been limited to spinnaker sails, spinnaker poles and masts.

“Masts have broken three times,” he said. “But it’s in the mast that everybody will make the first experiment . . . and in spinnaker poles. A lot of spinnaker poles are breaking.

“Dennis (Conner) has blown out four spinnakers (five as of Tuesday). We haven’t blown any, so I guess we overbuilt.”

Koch said in a collision the carbon-fiber IACC boats could “shatter like glass.”

Indeed, Meldner said, in competition in the World 50-Footer class, “some boats have run into each other and they splintered up pretty good.”

All the designers have been watching the boats closely.

“Nobody has shown us real breakthrough speed,” Meldner said, “but that’s not surprising. Nobody puts out their fastest gear this soon.”