Racing as the engine of design
Yachts were built for pleasure, but sailors have raced them almost as long as they have owned them. Racing gives designers a clear question, which boat is faster, and the answers have shaped hull forms, rigs and materials. The best-known setting for that contest is the America’s Cup, though many other events and rating systems mattered as well.
The story of the cup is also a story about rules. Most of the striking changes in yacht design came from designers working out what a rule allowed, and then using it to the limit.
The schooner America
In August 1851, during the Great Exhibition year, the American schooner America sailed against a field of British yachts in a race around the Isle of Wight organised by the Royal Yacht Squadron. She was designed by George Steers and built in New York, and she won the trophy, a silver ewer. The result surprised many British observers, who had assumed their cutters were superior. The trophy was later given to the New York Yacht Club and came to be called the America’s Cup.
Her success was usually credited to a finely shaped hull and well-cut sails. Historians debate how much of it came from the design and how much from conditions on the day, so it is safest to say that the boat was fast and the victory was real. Whatever the reasons, it began a long period of competition between American and British yachtsmen.
A long run for the defenders
The terms of the contest were set out in a Deed of Gift in 1857, and challengers had to travel to meet the holder. For 132 years, until 1983, the cup stayed with the New York Yacht Club. Challenges came from Britain, Canada, Australia and elsewhere. Sir Thomas Lipton, a Scottish tea merchant, challenged repeatedly between 1899 and 1930 with a series of yachts named Shamrock, and never won.
The boats themselves grew enormous. Early contests used large schooners, and by the early twentieth century the competing yachts were gaff-rigged sloops and cutters with huge sail areas. Nathanael Herreshoff of Bristol, Rhode Island, designed several defenders, including Reliance in 1903, with extreme overhangs and a vast spread of canvas. The boats were fast but fragile, and expensive enough to limit the pool of competitors.
The J-Class and the shift to the twelve-metre
The 1930s saw the J-Class, big sloops built to a formula that allowed long hulls and tall rigs. The designs were impressive, but few owners could afford them, and the Second World War ended that era. When the cup resumed in 1958 it was sailed in twelve-metre yachts, built to the International Rule, in which length, sail area and other measurements are combined in a formula. The twelve-metre class remained in use until 1987.
A rating rule of this kind treats the whole boat as a set of trade-offs. A designer who shortened one measurement could lengthen another, and the best boats were those that found the most efficient balance. Details such as the position of the rudder, the shape of the keel and the weight of the crew all became subjects of study. In 1967 the American defender Intrepid separated her rudder from the keel and made other refinements, a change that spread through later racing yachts. Tank testing and, increasingly, computer analysis replaced intuition.
1983 and the winged keel
The best-remembered moment of the twentieth century came in 1983 at Newport, Rhode Island. The Australian challenger Australia II, financed by Alan Bond and designed by Ben Lexcen, carried a keel with small wing-like extensions at its base. The design was initially kept covered by a shroud, and it provoked arguments about whether it conformed to the rules. Australia won the series, ending the longest winning streak in international sport, as the cup’s holders were often described. It is hard to say how much of the victory came from the keel itself and how much from boat speed, crew and tactics, but the wing keel influenced later designs.
The United States regained the cup in 1987 at Fremantle, Western Australia, and the contest was open to a broader group of challengers.
New classes and foiling
In the 1990s the twelve-metre was replaced by the International America’s Cup Class, a lighter and more modern monohull, used for several editions. Teams from New Zealand, Switzerland and elsewhere won it in the following years, and the host city moved around the world.
Later editions departed further from tradition. Multihulls appeared in 1988, when a catamaran met a very large monohull in a disputed match, and again in 2010, when a trimaran won. In 2013, in San Francisco, teams raced large wing-sailed catamarans that rose on foils. The foiling monohulls introduced in 2021 continued that direction, and the teams had become professional organisations far removed from the amateur yachting that began the cup. Each step brought new multihull innovation into what had been a monohull contest.
What racing left behind
Several features of ordinary yachts came from racing. Bermudan rigs, lighter hull construction, improved sail cloth, and winches and rope handling gear all grew from the competition for small advantages. Rating rules also gave cruising boats a common vocabulary of length, displacement and sail area ratios.
The price of this process was that some of the fastest racing boats were poorly suited to everyday use. Even so, the interaction between racing and design is probably the chief reason that a modern cruising yacht differs so much from one built in 1851.