11:45 AM Thu 15 Oct 2009 GMT
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'The man whose name is synonymous with the winged keel, Ben Lexcen was the most prolific Cup designer over the five-match period that ran from 1974 through 1987.'
Rolex
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Noted America's Cup historian, John Rousmaniere reflects on the current brouhaha over the designer of Australia II's winged keel.
The issue of who designed Australia II has come to the forefront once again (and more angrily than ever, it seems). It last arose four years ago when I wrote an article for the American magazine Sailing World titled 'Who Designed Australia II?'
The story was stimulated by a particular question by a particular group, the America's Cup Hall of Fame Selection Committee. The Hall of Fame is not (as the Sydney Morning Herald reported) an entity of the New York Yacht Club. It is an arm of another institution altogether, the Herreshoff Marine Museum, the repository of the works and archives of Nathanael Greene Herreshoff in Bristol, RI. More about the museum and the Hall of Fame may be found at
www.herreshoff.org/
Back then, when I spoke or corresponded with some 40 people, including Peter Van Oossanen, about the boat's design history, I was representing the Hall of Fame as a one-man subcommittee attempting to gain some insight into a well-known, 20-year-old controversy involving a candidate whose nomination had stalled in the selection committee, Ben Lexcen. To revive the nomination (which I backed), I believed the best thing to do was to ask some questions and file a report. I worked exactly as I do when I write books and articles-going down the middle, following the research trail, and sorting opinion from fact.
After my report (which was later published in Sailing World), the selection committee elected Lexcen into the Hall of Fame with only one dissenter, who was not me. While we differed over some details, the majority agreed that Lexcen deserved the honor because of his long involvement with the America's Cup, because of his brilliance, and because of Australia II, to which he contributed in many, many ways. There may be arguments about what exactly those contributions were. Yet it is no small thing in someone's biography to have taken such a leading role in such a project. This boat changed yachts forever-in its shape, in its rigging, in its sails, and in its racing record.
I wish the whole bitter argument surrounding this matter would go away. I suspect that it would if some credit were given to the individual Dutch researchers for their roles in the team. Yes, the extent of those roles may be in dispute. But the fact of them is not. Reckoning time is passing too quickly to be wasted in bickering over credits.
The story to which John Rousmaniere refers is as follows:
In 1983 an Australian team ended the New York YC's grip on the America's Cup in a breakthrough 12-Meter famous for its winged keel. That pivotal moment in sailing history has long since passed, yet there remains a long-running dispute about the roles taken in the design of this remarkable boat by the designer of record, Ben Lexcen, and his technical team.
As a member of the America's Cup Hall of Fame selection committee, I know this controvery well. After many years of heated debate concerning the merits of selecting Lexcen, in 2004 I volunteered to serve as a committee of one answering the question, 'Who designed Australia II?'
Over a year and a half I reviewed the record while soliciting statements from dozens of people. In October 2005 I presented a report to the committee, which then selected Lexcen for the Hall of Fame.
Before proceeding, I should disclose that I am a long-time, but hardly lockstep, member of the New York YC. As a writer I strive to be fair, and I long ago recognized that nothing in the America's Cup is as simple as it first seems.
It is clear that Australia II was the creation of a brilliant international design team, headed by Ben Lexcen. Other answers to our question have tended to follow two opposite paths. One leads to the conviction that the designer of record, Lexcen, was also the designer in fact, meaning that he conceptualized Australia II's three distinctive features: a small hull, a small 'upside-down' keel, and the winglets on that keel.
Three reasons have been given: First, Lexcen, the boat's owner, Alan Bond, and other members of the Australia II team said as much during and after the controversy-ridden 1983 America's Cup summer. Second, Lexcen had long experimented with several of Australia II's features. Some of his Australian 18s, model boats, and other designs had wing-like endplates and unusually small fins.When he worked on the design for Bond's 1977 Cup challenger, Australia, he and his associate, Johan Valentijn, tested wings and a keel 15 to 20 percent smaller than the norm before doubts about the accuracy of the tank tests led them back to more conventional shapes.
The third reason many people give for concluding that Lexcen must have designed Australia II is the man himself. Bob Fisher, the English sailing journalist (and America's Cup Hall of Fame Selection Committee member), characterized Lexcen's talent this way: 'Outrageous in its naivet?, fundamental in its approach, and gloriously effective in its delivery.'
Grant Simmer, who sailed in Australia II and now helps run the Alinghi campaign, told me, 'As a yacht designer with his small boat and skiff background, he was intuitively one of the best I have worked with (even if not technically the best, given his background).' Simmer's last words refer to the fact that Lexcen dropped out of school at the age of 14.
People who knew Lexcen before his death in 1988, at age 52, have affectionately described him as brilliant, chaotic, loveable, and extravagant. Here is the man who ended a former business relationship by changing his name from prosaic Robert Clyde Miller to the more dramatic Ben Lexcen (the inspiration is still in dispute). 'He has the most glorious flights of fancy,'
John Bertrand, Australia II's skipper, wrote of Lexcen in 1985, 'always talking about the depths of the oceans, about dolphins and other great fishes.My children love him, because in a sense he is very like them, full of wonderment at a world he believes is probably undiscovered.'
A journalist who spent several tumultuous days with Lexcen, Jay Broze, called him 'the sailing world's undisputed champion of free association' and a man with 'his own personal brand of reminiscent hyperbole.' This caution can easily be forgotten in the natural rush to believe only such an outrageously original individual could have produced such an outrageously original boat. If the first path through the thicket of the Australia II design question is a sprint to this remarkable man-more Romantic poet than engineer-the second is a methodical pace into the realm of two Dutch scientists with advanced degrees who worked in cutting-edge test facilities in the Netherlands.
These are Dr. Peter van Oossanen, a naval architect at the Netherlands Ship Model Basin (NSMB), and Joop Slooff, an aerodynamicist at the Theoretical Aerodynamics Department of the National Aerospace Laboratory While Lexcen often portrayed them as advisors who followed his direction, the two scientists have described their relationship as one of partners. In their view, Lexcen gets high marks not for creating the design but for managing it-for recognizing the possibilities, for helping to persuade Alan Bond that he must build this crazy-looking boat, for designing the rig and construction plan, and, for working with Bertrand, the New Zealand sail designer Tom Schnackenberg, and the rest of the crew to refine Australia II.
Here it helps to appreciate the stakes that were at play at the genesis of Australia II in the spring of 1981. In Bond's previous Cup challenges in 1974, 1977, and 1980, he had spent small fortunes sending innovative Lexcen-designed boats to Newport only to watch them destroyed by defenders. Bond's boats sailed a total of 13 races in Cup matches and lost 12 of them. To compound his disappointment, each American defender was a variation on old theme, the 1967 defender Intrepid.
Bond became convinced that no Australian helmsman could beat Dennis Conner, no Australian crew could sail better than American crews, and no inventory of Australian sails could be superior to American sails.
So it all came down to the boat. As greedy as Bond was for a design breakthrough, he was wary when a euphoric Lexcen first told him about this new design, which looked like no other boat and was costing a million dollars in research. In his autobiography, Bond wrote:'He told me that this yacht had the potential to beat the Americans to the first windward mark by three minutes- an incredible margin; it was like putting the Concorde up against a Boeing 747.'
Bond and his campaign manager,Warren Jones, were persuaded, but only to a degree. When they gave the go-ahead for the strange boat, they also ordered a far more conventional Lexcen-designed backup called Challenge 12. Once the decision was made, the stakes increased exponentially, secrecy about the design became crucial, and all else tumbled after, the good with the ill. What was the Dutch relationship? Work on the design continued in the Netherlands. Just how it continued is the question.
Only Lexcen's most extreme proponents argue that the Dutch scientists played no significant role in the design. Even Lexcen never said that much. The issue boils down to the manner and degree of their contribution. Creativity is never an individual activity.
As Lexcen often said, 'Good ideas are all around us.' Creative people are constantly influenced by what they read, see, and hear. To quote an insightful music critic's description of how the Beatles wrote songs, 'John whistles to Paul, and Paul whistles back.'Who whistled first at the Netherlands Ship Model Basin?
Lexcen told his biographer, Bruce Stannard, that the relationship between the Dutch scientists and himself was like the one between university professors and a student. 'I went to Wageningen like a dry sponge . . . I used their brains. I used their knowledge and their experience.' Yet he went on to state, vaguely,'The ideas come from me but they draw them up to fit their own requirements.'
A far more detailed description of their working methodology is laid out in documents submitted to me by Peter van Oossanen in response to my questions. His statements, apparently the first he has made for the public record, are consistent with accounts by Joop Slooff published immediately after the 1983 races in Michael Levitt and Barbara Lloyd's book Upset, and then in 1985 in an article by Lloyd. The thrust of both men's statements is that Australia II's design was so complex and dependent on advanced aerodynamic and hydrodynamic theories that no one person could possibly have produced it-neither Lexcen nor van Oossanen nor Slooff.
Van Oossanen had approached Bond in 1978 with a proposal that he conduct model tests for the next challenger.
Discussions were held between Lexcen and van Oossanen over the next few months until Bond decided to challenge again in 1980 with Australia. She won one race in light air thanks to the larger than normal mainsail set on an extremely bendy mast-a loophole-exploiting concept that Lexcen borrowed from the English challenger.
Early in 1981 Lexcen signed up van Oossanen, who brought in Slooff. According to Van Oossanen, they worked as many scientific research teams do: 'The team leader gives general instructions while the team members actually conceive the specific features.' Here, Lexcen was the leader. Slooff told Barbara Lloyd, 'There's not the slightest doubt in my mind that Ben Lexcen had full design responsibility. But it doesn't necessarily mean that he conceived the concept.'
Slooff made that statement in 1984. Van Oossanen, however, held off telling his story until recently. He told me this is because he has many Australian friends whom he did not wish to offend by seeming to criticize an Australian hero. (Van Oossanen himself was raised in Australia and became a citizen there.) At least one defender of the Lexcen claim believes that van Oossanen's feelings were influenced by disagreements stemming from before the 1987 America's Cup, when van Oossanen's superiors barred him from working exclusively for Bond.
But van Oossanen told me that what stirred him to finally make his case last year was an article by a former Australian Cup skipper, Jim Hardy, claiming that the Dutch played no significant part in the boat. Coincidentally, this was about the time I sent him my queries. According to van Oossanen now and Slooff more than 20 years ago, what was called 'the A2 concept' evolved rapidly in the spring of 1981.
In the first three weeks of work, at a time when Lexcen was at NSMB, van Oossanen and his colleagues drew up what van Oossanen has described to me as 'a number of radically different keel geometries.' One was an inverted keel that proceeded to perform well in Slooff 's computer analysis and in van Oossanen's tank tests.
Slooff proposed placing winglets on the keel, which they did. Then van Oossanen recommended that the hull be as small as permitted under the 12-Meter rule, with a 44-foot waterline length and (under the International Rule's balancing act) a larger than normal sail area. They did that, too. Van Oossanen had been working on the then-novel notion of a small Twelve for several years.
At the Chesapeake Sailing Yacht Symposium in January 1979, he presented an equationpacked technical paper in which he predicted that in a wind less than 15 knots (conditions often found at Newport), a small 12- Meter would beat a big one every time. After showing the design to Bond, Jones, and John Bertrand during a lay day in the 1981 Admiral's Cup, van Oossanen took it to Australia, where Lexcen approved it. Van Oossanen says he then provided fullscale loftings for construction in Australia.
Here the story becomes a little unclear.
Van Oossanen told me that when he returned to Australia to recheck the plans before construction, he was surprised to see that Lexcen had redrawn the plans for the keel in his own hand, though without alteration. Grant Simmer offers a different perspective. When he visited the towing tank in Holland, Lexcen declined to show him the new boat's test models.
Simmer's first detailed look at the design, therefore, came in Australia when he saw plans drawn by Lexcen. 'Ben definitely drew the lines plan for the boat and section/detail drawings of the keel,' Simmer told me. 'I have seen the drawings and loftings of the boat and keel, and they were definitely by Ben; additionally, as was Ben's way, they were changing up until the very last moment.'
It could be that Simmer and van Oossanen are referring to the same set of plans. Simmer believes that Lexcen contributed to the design of the winglets: 'Ben definitely developed the geometry of the wings (which were incredibly crude even by '87 standards) since I saw him deciding on and altering the shape while the keel pattern was being built.' Van Oossanen says that the boat designed in Holland was the one built in Australia. 'No changes were made,' he told me in an e-mail last December after I quoted Simmer's observation. 'Warren Jones was very particular in this respect. He didn't want anyone to change anything we had developed for A2. I remember John Longley and Warren Jones asking me about the rudder that Ben (and John Bertrand) wanted to change. I approved of this, and this was subsequently decided.'
In van Oossanen's account, Lexcen's relationship with him and Slooff was decidedly hands-off. Lexcen admitted that his lack of advanced education made him a distant supervisor of technicians. Referring to his relationship with his assistants on the design of Southern Cross, the 1974 challenger, he told Jay Broze, 'I got a little lazy, since there was no way I could double- check what they were doing anyway.' Speaking of the Netherlands Ship Model Basin in 1981, Lexcen told Lloyd and Levitt, 'I just went in there, and they just left me alone. I would just sketch stuff, and draw stuff, and take it to van Oossanen, and he would draw it up and feed it into the machine to make models. They were just doing what I told them.'
But Lexcen then qualified that statement. 'Sometimes they'd tell me things back. How the hell can you stop them from telling you things? It's like a jury- 'Well, disregard that remark . . .'You can't disregard that remark. If someone says, 'I think this could be a good idea,' you can't say, 'I didn't hear that.'' Obviously, there was a lot of whistling going on at NSMB.
Where Nationality Comes In
Lexcen made a revealing comment to Lloyd and Levitt: 'The situation at the bloody tank puts you almost under conditions that would contravene the spirit of the bloody ruling of the New York YC.' The fact was that a sword of Damocles hung over this revolutionary seminar in yacht design. It was the nationality rule governing the America's Cup.
We should spend a moment on the nationality question, if only because so much of the debate about the design of Australia II has been focused on it-I think wrongly. International crews had been common in the early days of the America's Cup, butmulti-nationalism reappeared in a far more significant way in the 1970s. An American, Andy Rose, was Bond's tactician in 1977. A Dutch yacht designer, Johan Valentijn, helped design challengers for Bond in 1977 and the French in 1980 before signing up with Dennis Conner for 1983. All this led the New York YC to write a new rule stating that sailors and designers of boats, rigs, and sails must be nationals of the boat's flag country.
The rule turned out to be quite lenient. Someone who had a domicile in the relevant country qualified as readily as a passport holder. This rule did not bother the Bond syndicate at first. Very little was said to the scientists until early 1983 when, van Oossanen told me,Warren Jones told them that an application for a U.S. patent on the keel that was intended to protect its secrecy would be in Lexcen's name alone. Lips remained sealed until the summer of 1983, when Slooff went to Newport and was surprised he was not publicly credited for his work on the keel of the most successful boat in town. At that he started talking.
The New York YC's America's Cup Committee somewhat heavy-handedly insisted that van Oossanen sign an affidavit stating that Australia II had been designed by a Dutch-Australian team.Although he had not signed a confidentiality agreement with Bond, van Oossanen refused to go along because, he told me, it would have given the New York YC a reason for declining to sail the Cup match and 'The whole of Australia would have hated me for this for ever and ever.'
If van Oossanen was not yet aware he had become a pawn in someone else's game, that became obvious when he was asked to send a telex to Warren Jones, in which he stated,'Mr. Lexcen himself designed Australia II.' The telex then went out in a press release. In the end, the nationality question became moot when the New York YC held the races. Conner and Liberty put up a brave battle, but were caught on the second to last leg of the last race, and the America's Cup was gone.
The scenario I have sketched above is the one that makes the best sense to me. You may disagree, but if you do, spare a little sympathy for two scientists who did their work well, only to be thrust between the hard place of their loyalty to a client and the rock of their satisfaction that they had helped bring about a revolution.
Published Sources
The author thanks Ryoichi Steven Tsuchiya for his assistance and credits the following publications as sources:
'Ben Lexcen.' The Encyclopedia of Yacht Designers. New York: W.W. Norton, 2005. Bertrand, John. Born to Win. New York: Hearst Marine, 1985. Bond, Alan, with Rob Mundle. Bond. Pymble, Australia: HarperCollins, 2004. Broze, Jay. 'The Man Who Won the America's Cup,' Nautical Quarterly no. 25, Spring 1984. Levitt, Michael and Barbara Lloyd. Upset: Australia Wins the America's Cup. New York: Nautical Quarterly/Workman, 1983. Lloyd, Barbara. 'Who Really Designed Australia II?' Nautical Quarterly no. 29, Spring 1985. van Oossanen, Peter. 'Theoretical Estimation of the Influence of Some Main Design Factors on the Performance of International Twelve Meter Class Yachts.' Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers, The Fourth Chesapeake Sailing Yacht Symposium, Annapolis, Maryland (1979). Stannard, Bruce. Ben Lexcen: The Man, the Keel, and the Cup. London: Faber and Faber, 1984. Valentijn, Johan, in David Beck, 'Keels,' Yacht Racing & Cruising, January 1984.
by John Rousmaniere
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Troughton Island, WA
