First Forty(1)Design Leaves McConaghy

Hull no1 of the new Jason Ker-designed Forty(1)Design is now complete. The latest addition to the Class40 fleet left McConaghy Boats last week and is now on a ship bound for the UK, where she is due to arrive in Southampton mid-August.

Project Manager of the Forty(1)Design, Ned Collier Wakefield, who will also skipper the boat with Sam Goodchild in November’s Transat Jacques Vabre transatlantic race, has spent the last six weeks at McConaghy’s facility, 40km west of Hong Kong. His time there allowed him to oversee the final fit out and sign off all of the boat’s systems prior to her being shipped. This included all internal features, such as the water ballast and nav station and the Forty(1)Design’s unique keel tower.

Above deck the job list included checking the articulating bowsprit and the custom kick-up rudders and steering system as well as the cockpit layout.

Once the Forty(1)Design arrives in the UK it will be united with its mast and sails. American Scott Ferguson, currently heading up the wing engineering and design team for Oracle Team USA’s AC72s, and who has previously been mast designer for Luna Rossa and numerous Volvo Open 70 campaigns, was employed to carry out engineering and design work on the new Class40’s spar. He worked in conjunction with Southern Spars, who built the tube in South Africa, before it was shipped to Denmark for finishing.

Meanwhile the sails are being built by North UK, but have been designed by American Chris Williams, formerly sail designer with the Team Shosholoza and United Internet Team Germany America’s Cup campaigns. Under Class40 rules two of the sails can be exotics and for the Forty(1)Design these are being built in North’s state of the art aramid 3Di.

Once the boat is complete, Collier Wakefield and Sam Goodchild will be taking every opportunity to work the boat up and make sure she is on the pace ready for her first major event – the Transat Jacques Vabre. This will see a fleet of more than twenty Class40s leaving Le Havre on 3rd November. Ahead of them will be a month long 5,450 mile doublehanded race down the Atlantic and across the Doldrums to Itajaí in southern Brazil. This will certainly be quite some maiden voyage for Team Concise’s sophisticated new Class40.

[mappress]
Press Release, August 8, 2013