Dee Caffari chooses Owen Clarke Design and Clay Oliver to design new 60 |
| Tuesday, 09 January 2007 |
| Owen Clarke Design (OCD) will be designing the new Aviva for Dee Caffari Racing, working again with Team New Zealand designer Clay Oliver, SP Technologies and their design associates from around the globe.
Since 2000 OCD have launched more ‘new generation’ designs than any other design office. This will be their seventh Open 60 and third in eighteen months where there exists funding and time to undertake a research and development program. Drawing on the broad experience of the Aviva team and that of OCD, Clay Oliver and their associates, the aim is to produce a winning boat as well as the top level support that any serious Vendee Globe project requires to succeed.
Lead designer Merfyn Owen comments:
“Obviously this won’t be the first time that Owen Clarke Design been involved in a Vendee project with a young female skipper. The dynamics are different in many ways this time, both positive and negative of course. Always there will be the sceptics, but they should remember what has been achieved before when highly motivated skippers and their teams with boats such as Kingfisher and Ecover have set their sites on the Vendee Globe.
A wise and well known race boat skipper said something like this to me once: “ All the pre-race talk centres around past results, sail wardrobe, waterline beam and other boat speed considerations. Often, with the exception of the winner the finishers at the end are left reflecting and discussing broken boats, gear failure, missed routing opportunities and bad luck.”
Never has this been more true than in the Vendee Globe where the quality of the whole project and some of that luck defines the result. This is a race where you cannot stop, fix it, or ship the boat to the next restart. The distance between those on the winners’ podium is measured in days and with the rest of the fleet in weeks. We always aim to produce the fastest boat and in the past I believe we have achieved that, but it takes so much more to be a Vendee winner”
- e n d s –
Owen Clarke Design
Owen Clarke Design (OCD) LLP is recognised as being at the leading edge of high performance yacht design. OCD is known particularly as pioneers in the field of canting and lifting/canting keels for racing and cruising boats. Their design portfolio spans yachts from the 6.5m Mini Transat class to the 32m superyacht Paragon and will now include their seventh Open 60 – Aviva.
www.owenclarkedesign.com
Clay Oliver
A principal designer for Team New Zealand since 1995 and an active member of the sailing team, Clay Oliver has been involved in six America's Cups, including four winners. Recent design projects include record-setting Mari-Cha IV, and some new generation high-performance swing keel yachts, including the 100ft sloop Maximus . He is a graduate naval architect from the US Naval Academy.
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