Over the last 15 months, Vest’as Sailrocket team has been focused on building a better, safer and – above all – faster boat at Vestas Technology R&D’s facilities on the Isle of Wight. The culmination of this work was yesterday’s launch of Sailrocket 2.
“Since we started pursuing the Outright World Speed Sailing Record 9 years ago, the record has been raised by exactly 9 knots. The current record holders, the kite surfers, have taken it out of the reach of all the previous contenders and it is going to take a very special boat to get it back. Vestas Sailrocket 2 is a boat that aims high. The only satisfactory outcome for us is the outright record,” Paul Larsen, pilot and project leader from the Sailrocket 2 team says.
With the record raised to the current level, the ambitious team behind Sailrocket is even more eager to develop a boat to break the Outright World Speed Sailing Record (average speed of a craft between two points set 500 metres apart). In order to do that, conventional design has been left behind and everything is pushed to the limit.
“Many lessons have been learned since the first Sailrocket was launched in 2004. The first boat shows the scars of the many learning processes we have been through over the years. In the end it performed as predicted; although she briefly emerged as the fastest boat in the world, she never achieved the Outright record title. The record was like a mirage: as we got faster, so did the record,” explains Larsen. “We learnt a lot with the first boat. The recent performance of the kite surfers vindicated our decision to build a new boat. I’m confident that Sailrocket 2 has the potential to take the record to new levels.”
Main Sailrocket sponsor, Finn Strøm Madsen, President of Vestas Technology R&D, emphasises the Sailrocket team’s efforts in bringing knowledge about wind, design and sailing together in order to be the fastest in the world.
“Vestas has a deep interest in the Sailrocket project. By using innovation and technological breakthroughs you can harvest the power of wind with ever-improving efficiency. That is the key for both Vestas and Sailrocket. I look forward to seeing the new Vestas Sailrocket 2 push the boundaries of wind driven performance in the search of speed,” he says.
Vestas Sailrocket 2 is a speed sailing boat based on a unique, stabilising concept and currently holds the B class world record for speed sailing. The sail and keel elements are positioned so that there is virtually no overturning moment and no net vertical lift. As a result, the only significant response to wind gusts is a change in speed. For Paul Larsen and Malcolm Barnsley, design team member from Vestas, the Vestas Sailrocket 2 project is a realisation of their ultimate dream: to design and sail the fastest boat on the planet.
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