Stars & Stripes’ Success Attributed to ‘Some Gradual Changes’
Tom Blackaller said he was “baffled” at the way Dennis Conner’s Stars & Stripes ran away from his USA in the challenge semifinals, and nobody has really explained why the dominance suddenly shifted from New Zealand to the American 12-meter in the finals.
“I’ll tell you what it’s attributed to,” Conner says. “We’ve made some gradual changes to our boat since we’ve been here and it’s becoming evident. The most dramatic thing we did was to widen our (keel) wings before we raced Tom Blackaller. An accumulation of those things is adding up.”
Especially in the current series against Chris Dickson’s KZ7, Stars & Stripes has methodically destroyed some myths about itself, one by one: Foremost, that it was a sea slug in moderate wind and that it turned like a supertanker.
Conner says: “We don’t like to tack because that’s playing Chris’ game. He tacks a little better than we do. (But) we feel if we have to tack, we can do so without throwing the race away.”
But how about the “riblets,” those grooved plastic sheets that were plastered to the boat’s bottom after the trial rounds? Virtually all of Stars & Stripes’ advantage has been upwind. If the riblets have made it faster, why isn’t it faster downwind, too?
Design coordinator John Marshall says: “Anytime you have a drag reduction, the difference is amplified upwind. The boat is going slower (than off the wind) so the riblets make a proportionately larger difference.”
Probably a more important improvement is the new inventory of sails designed by tactician Tom Whidden. Produced on site by the syndicate’s unofficial “We Be G” Sail Co. (for We Be Guessing), they are flatter for fine maneuvering in strong winds.
Conner calls them “our homemade sails,” but they work.
“It’s the boat, the sails and the crew,” Marshall says. “I feel that the tacking advantage (New Zealand) had is pretty darn small or not there at all, and we’re quicker accelerating out of the tacks than we were.”
Stars & Stripes’ recent performance also has changed some minds about what looks fast and is fast. The thinking once was that a 12-meter with a hobby horse motion was riding the waves more easily than one that plowed through.
“I’m beginning to change my mind on that,” Whidden said after an early race against KZ7. “Today I think we hobby-horsed less than they did.”
Marshall: “The boat’s sailing a little steadier in rough water. A boat that’s in the groove has a smooth motion. A boat that’s thrashing around is going slow.”
But speed is relative. The Kiwis probably are going as fast as they were when they rolled to 28 straight wins, losing only once--maybe a little faster. But Stars & Stripes is going remarkably faster than it was.
Whidden says of the Kiwis: “My guess is the last time they changed their ballast was mid-November.”
“If you’re rich quick it’s hard to make changes,” Whidden says. “We’ve been trying to upgrade a lot. I think they’ve been lulled into complacency, like we were with Australia II (in ‘83).
“We’ve made changes in our boat and didn’t know if they were faster or not, but it doesn’t make us slower (so) we keep ‘em on there for psych-up.”
Marshall’s program also calls for Stars & Stripes’ profile to be geared to each opponent’s strengths and weaknesses, as well as the changing conditions. The wind is expected to be lighter for the Cup finals in February.
“We’ve been looking at the Aussies all along, especially from a technical standpoint,” Marshall says. “My job is to prepare for the next series (and) a different weather pattern against a different kind of boat.”
The developer of the riblets is Frank Marentic, who works for 3M in Minnesota.
He first tried the product on cars and airplanes but found moderate success only with the latter. Then he started experimenting with boats and noted that the skin of whales and sharks wasn’t really smooth but consisted of microscopic, longitudinal grooves.
Hence, riblets were born.
Sunday’s double lay day also gave defender finalist Australia IV time to consider its near-hopeless position, trailing a faster Kookaburra III, 3-0, in their best-of-nine series.
In the semifinals, Alan Bond’s boat appeared slightly faster. The only place the Kookaburras could beat it was in the protest room.
But modifications before the finals appear to have been bungled catastrophically. Trained observers suspect that larger wings on the keel have made the boat less stable than before and speculate that it also has more drag, making the boat slower.
The syndicate won’t admit to any of that but says, in a statement: “It is becoming obvious that we must improve Australia IV’s upwind performance.”
Otherwise, it’s bye-bye, Bondy. That would be a sad day for most Australians, whose sentiment strongly favors Bond over his less charismatic Kookaburra rival, Kevin Parry.
The Perth Sunday Times points up the irony that as it was the winged keel that gave Australia II its edge in ‘83, another keel may have destroyed Australia IV in ’87.
If Conner wins the Cup, look for his syndicate to promote a heavy television involvement for the next defense in the United States.
“I haven’t been home since we’ve had the races (live) on television,” he says. “But for it to become major sport in America, television will have to be a major part of it.
“Until the people en masse, other than the hard core sailors, really have the feeling of how exciting it is to be on the boats themselves, I don’t think it’s gonna develop the same sort of support that some of our traditional American sports like football and baseball have.
“For us to get that type of exposure in America, we’re gonna have to get the spectator onto the boat and let him feel a part of the drama . . . the sort of things experienced by Chris (Dickson) on KZ7 (Saturday). If (viewers) were there, they’d be hooked for life.”
Unfortunately, the Kiwis declined to place a remote TV camera on KZ7 for the series, while Conner leaped at the chance. Kookaburra III also has one, but not Australia IV.
“If indeed our goal is to (stimulate) this type of support from the people in America we need to be able to compete on the same basis as some of the other major sports in terms of excitement and letting the fans be part it,” Conner says.
Stars & Stripes is down to one syndicate spectator boat for the next few days. El Zorro, owned by Jim Edmiston of San Diego, rammed the dock returning after Saturday’s race and lost a two-foot chunk of its bow.
That leaves only the larger, $9 million Carmac VI to carry VIPs, friends and relatives out to the race course and it’s been near capacity with 80 passengers.
In the difficult downwind docking, the El Zorro skipper was drifting toward the wharf when he hit the throttle, thinking the engine room had the craft in reverse. Instead, it was full speed ahead.
The signal that Stars & Stripes is about to leave the dock each day is a blast from the whistle on its twin-hulled tender, Betsy, followed by a blaring rendition of Kenny Loggins’ “Danger Zone” from the movie “Top Gun” over giant speakers on the afterdeck.
The last couple of days Conner also has had a trumpet player performing alongside the boat before it shoves off. He is Jerry Williams of Texas, who was sitting in with a Dixieland group at Chez Orleans in North Fremantle when Conner and his wife Judy dropped in one night last week.
Williams blows such non-sailing tunes as “When The Saints Go Marching In” and “Dark Town Strutters’ Ball,” but nobody seems to mind. He also is working on “Stars and Stripes Forever.”
For one night only, the New Zealand boosters were carrying on at the Fremantle Hotel with their own version of an American song: “The Day We Drove Old Dennis Down.”