{"id":10463,"date":"2016-04-02T16:54:44","date_gmt":"2016-04-02T21:54:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stephenlirakis.com\/?p=10463"},"modified":"2016-04-02T16:54:44","modified_gmt":"2016-04-02T21:54:44","slug":"claims-credit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stephenlirakis.com\/?p=10463","title":{"rendered":"MORE CLAIMS OF CREDIT"},"content":{"rendered":"<h1 id=\"story-headline\">Flying Dutchmen who won America\u2019s Cup with a keel<\/h1>\n<ul id=\"story-info\" class=\"no-author\">\n<li class=\"byline\">PIERS AKERMAN<\/li>\n<li class=\"source\">THE AUSTRALIAN<\/li>\n<li class=\"timestamp\"><time class=\"date-and-time\" datetime=\"2016-04-01T13:00:00.000Z\">APRIL 2, 2016 12:00AM<\/time><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<div id=\"story-media-assets\" class=\"js-tabbed ci-count-1 js-ready js-ready-tabbed\">\n<div class=\"js-tab-container\">\n<div class=\"js-tab-content image-tab-content js-active-content\">\n<div class=\"js-tab-content-inner\">\n<div class=\"story-image secondary-asset\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/cdn.newsapi.com.au\/\/image\/v1\/33595c7b9dea954774574f3da1a6e46d?width=650\" alt=\"\" \/><\/p>\n<p class=\"story-caption\">Australia II, which won the 1983 America\u2019s Cup with its secret weapon \u2013 the winged-keel. Picture: Tom R Ragland<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"story-image secondary-asset\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/cdn.newsapi.com.au\/\/image\/v1\/cb4e3cff1ef3f5e4c577cb77778cee2b?width=650\" alt=\"\" \/><\/p>\n<p class=\"story-caption\">Australia II at Newport, Rhode Island, after winning the 1983 America\u2019s Cup.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"story-image secondary-asset mirrored\">Australia II, which won the 1983 America\u2019s Cup with its secret weapon \u2013 the winged-keel. Picture: Tom R Ragland<\/div>\n<div class=\"story-image secondary-asset mirrored\">Australia II at Newport, Rhode Island, after winning the 1983 America\u2019s Cup<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p><strong>The longest winning streak in organised sporting history was broken on September 26, 1983, when Alan Bond\u2019s Australia II broke the New York Yacht Club\u2019s 132-year hold on the America\u2019s Cup.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The revolutionary winged-keel was the key and all credit was given to Ben Lexcen, an immensely congenial, self-taught Sydney yacht designer.<\/p>\n<p>That was what Australia believes. It was also what Bond had to convince the New York Yacht Club to believe because in 1983 it was against the America\u2019s Cup rules to employ a designer who was not a national of the challenging club\u2019s country.<\/p>\n<p>But it was not true.<\/p>\n<p>Suspicions were rife from the beginning that Lexcen was not the originator of the groundbreaking keel design. In 2009 Dutchman Piet van Oossanen claimed responsibility for the original design of the keel\u2019s winglets and admitted accepting $25,000 in what he believed was hush money from Bond to keep the secret.<\/p>\n<p>Now his claim has to be qualified. The man who kept the secret of the keel\u2019s origin longest and who has best claim to be its designer has now come completely out of the shadow.<\/p>\n<p>He is another Dutchman, Johannes \u201cJoop\u201d Slooff, a retired fluid dynamicist with a degree in aeronautical engineering, who has laid out his case in his book\u00a0<i>Australia II and the America\u2019s Cup: The Untold, Inside Story of the Keel<\/i>.<\/p>\n<p>The evidence he presents to support his role as the keel designer seems irrefutable.<\/p>\n<p>In 1981, Oossanen was the representative of The Netherlands Ship Model Basin, also known as MARIN (MAritime Research Institute of the Netherlands), contracted by Bond to conduct tank testing for the Cup challenge, and Slooff had been recruited by Oos\u00adsanen from the Dutch National Aerospace Laboratory.<\/p>\n<p>Slooff, whom I met with his wife, Lia, in Newport while covering the historic 1983 America\u2019s Cup for\u00a0<i>The Australian<\/i>, spoke with me from his home in Uithoorn after the release of his book this week.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cBen Lexcen wanted to test variations on a conventional keel when he came to Holland in May 1981 at the NSMB\u2019s Wageningen test tank,\u201d he told me.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cHe may not have been aware I had been asked to join Piet for the keel design when he arrived.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cHe wanted to benchmark test the Australia model with a couple of other conventional types of keel with thicker sections that can accommodate more ballast.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI had by then been thinking about the winged keel for two or three weeks but as my real work was with aircraft I told him of my thoughts.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>For those two or three weeks, Slooff had been talking with van Oossanen about the keel shapes to be investigated through fluid dynamic computations at his department at NLR.<\/p>\n<p>When Lexcen arrived, he put forward the proposal for the upside-down keel and the winglets, and included from his computations the relative dimensions, twist, taper, cant angle, section shapes and such.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI had been arguing for years that an upside-down keel should suffer less from loss of side force through free water surface effects than ordinary tapered keels. My department at NLR had done research on winglets for aircraft around 1979-1980 and I realised that they would also be very effective in reducing the resistance due to side force of a sailing yacht when sailing upwind,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<p>Slooff stresses that he and his co-worker Harm Sytsma had been studying the aerodynamic characteristics and performance improvement aspects of winglets for aircraft wings for the Fokker aircraft company.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI argued that they should also work on sailing yacht keels and, probably, even better, because of the smaller span and the associated larger drag-due-to-lift of a keel as compared to an aircraft wing. In other words, they could improve the performance of a sailing yacht through a reduction of the underwater resistance when sailing upwind.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cBesides, winglets could accommodate additional low-positioned ballast that would improve the yacht\u2019s stability and upwind performance further.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Well aware of Lexcen\u2019s status as one of Australia\u2019s greatest sporting heroes with a legendary status akin to that of Phar Lap and approaching that of Donald Bradman, Slooff stresses that \u201cnothing of what I have said or written changes the fact that Ben Lexcen had full design responsibility and was free to adopt or reject whatever was proposed to him.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cBen and the Australian syndicate management had the courage to adopt something radical that had not (yet) proven its superiority. For this reason, the success of Australia II, in my opinion, is and remains an Australian success.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Those who have followed this saga across the past three decades will doubtless hark back to the stories of Lexcen fixing endplates \u2014 like little wings \u2014 to the rudder of his 18-footer Taipan nearly 20 years before Australia II, but his biographer Bruce Stannard wrote: \u201cBen told me he had tried the winged keel idea before but was unsure whether it would work.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Lexcen said to Stannard: \u201cI had tried fins or wings on 5.5s and dinghies and they never worked or if they did I couldn\u2019t tell the difference.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Slooff says: \u201cIf he played with winglets in the 1960s, then why didn\u2019t he put them on Southern Cross in 1974 and on Australia (I) in 1977 or 1980? And what about inverse taper (of the keel)?<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWith three of the main players \u2014 Lexcen, (Warren) Jones and Bond \u2014 no longer among us, I will probably never know the answers to these questions.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhat is certain, however, is that Ben Lexcen never told me about his 1960s winglets.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>There is no one left from that triumvirate at the innermost core of the victorious 1983 campaign to speak for Lexcen who died in 1988 from a heart attack, aged 52.<\/p>\n<p>Jones, executive director of Bond\u2019s challenge and the tough no-nonsense end of the victorious 1983 campaign, died aged 65 after a massive stroke in 2002, and Bond died during heart surgery last June, aged 77.<\/p>\n<p>John Longley, the project manager, who also sailed aboard Australia II, said it was difficult to say who had been responsible for what part of the enterprise when so many people had been involved.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cYou have to remember that Benny was alone, surrounded by Dutch technocrats, there were plenty of ideas flying around and I know he was twitchy about the whole deal later because he told me.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>I was aware Slooff had played an important role in the keel development when I met him, but when I asked Lexcen about Slooff\u2019s role when we were together in Newport after the series had ended he was uncharacteristically evasive.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cHe\u2019s a very friendly guy,\u201d isn\u2019t he, Lexcen said, and gave me one of his crew \u201cboxing kangaroo\u201d ties, which I still keep as a treasured memento of that Cup.<\/p>\n<p>Australia II skipper John Bertrand, now president of Swimming Australia and busily preparing his charges for the Olympic trials, visited the test tank in The Netherlands with Bond and Jones on a lay day during the 1981 Admiral\u2019s Cup series where he was racing Bond\u2019s Apollo V with many of the sailors who would crew Australia II.<\/p>\n<p>He says only someone of Lexcen\u2019s eclectic mindset could have brought the whole boat together successfully.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThat was his genius,\u201d Bertrand told me. \u201cHe had a dynamism, an extraordinary ability to accept what was different and see the merits. A great lateral thinker.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Bertrand recalls Bond and Jones were at war with the New York Yacht Club which was constantly trying to nail them on the rules.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThey even wanted us to stop using Microsoft Windows because the software wasn\u2019t created in Australia,\u201d he said, citing a challenge that was quickly dismissed.<\/p>\n<p id=\"U5029416649113RB\">Bertrand also pointed out that the rule that barred competitors from using designers from countries other than their own has now gone \u2014 but that even in 1983 was constantly being bent with yet another Dutchman, Johan Valentijn, adopting Australian citizenship to work on Bond\u2019s 1977 challenger Australia, taking up French citizenship to design for the French in 1980 before pledging allegiance to the US and signing up with Dennis Conner for 1983.<\/p>\n<p>Yachting veteran James Hardy says he spoke with Lexcen at Lexcen\u2019s home in Clontarf, Sydney, and the designer told him he had seen \u201csome blokes testing end plates for aeroplanes in the test tank and had asked them \u2018couldn\u2019t you do something with those on a boat?\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n<p>But how can we ever know, says Hardy, musing on the elements that combined to bring about historic victory, how can we ever know exactly which piece of coal makes the whistle blow?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Flying Dutchmen who won America\u2019s Cup with a keel PIERS AKERMAN THE AUSTRALIAN APRIL 2, 2016 12:00AM Australia II, which won the 1983 America\u2019s Cup with its secret weapon \u2013 the winged-keel. Picture: Tom R Ragland Australia II at Newport, Rhode Island, after winning the 1983 America\u2019s Cup. Australia II, which won the 1983 America\u2019s &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/stephenlirakis.com\/?p=10463\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">MORE CLAIMS OF CREDIT<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[42,2363,40,2748,414],"tags":[2749,2397,1626,1459],"class_list":["post-10463","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-12-meter-class","category-alan-bond","category-americas-cup","category-australia-ii","category-liberty","tag-2749","tag-americas-cup","tag-americas-cup-1983","tag-australia-ii"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stephenlirakis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10463","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stephenlirakis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stephenlirakis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stephenlirakis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stephenlirakis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10463"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stephenlirakis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10463\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10464,"href":"https:\/\/stephenlirakis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10463\/revisions\/10464"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stephenlirakis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10463"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stephenlirakis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10463"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stephenlirakis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10463"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}