Any major design differences on 94-97-01 built Volvo 60's on the market

Hello everyone, a close friend of mine is thinking about buying a V.O. 60 for corporate charter & race purposes , İve been recently looking into the yacht market and some articles . Honestly speaking it seems as if between years 1993 and 2001 , designers of volvo 60 class didn't have enough liberty to step up their game in a considerable amount. Having spoken to two owners of volvo 60's , one has the 93 the other 2001 designs and to my surprise , it seems on overall performance the 2001 design is only a mere 10% faster than the older sister.

İS it just me finding this odd ? i started doubting the validity of the info i got !!

Comments please!

 

ET,

The Opens are built to a pretty tight box rule design. This means that advances are pretty limited across the board, except when a new rule changes (like the advent of canting keels, or allowance of carbon fiber). However a 10% speed difference in racing sailboats is huge. It is the ability to get on top and cover, or make up a mistake... Sailboats just don't increase in speed by that large of a percentage very often.

 

I'd be staggered if the difference was anything like 10%. I'm not a VO 60 sailor but I was in the industry when the later VO 60s were being built and had the chance to talk to most of the teams - no one mentioned anything like 10% speed difference. Teams were using previous-gen boats to train on and they were only talking small difference in design between the '97/8 and '01/2 boats. If I recall correctly from a day on the practice boat for Assa Abloy (the runner-up) they thought by far the biggest difference would be the carbon mast, which won't speed you up by 10%.

Ten percent is about the same as the speed difference between a J/24 and a Melges 24, or a Farr 40 OD and the Beneteau First 40.7, or between a Mumm 36 and a Farr 25. As Stumble said, it's a vast difference.

 

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For some reason I don't remember Volvo 60's- they would probably have been based on the Open 60 race boats. The current Volvo ocean race is sailed in 70fters with a very tight rule. The reason that is important is because there have been dramatic improvements made in Open 60's since their days(??) in the Volvo Ocean race. The newest Open 60's like Virbac-Paprec 3 are the first large ocean racing monohulls to use curved lifting foils(pioneered in large trimarans years ago). In V'3's last race( see Barcelona World Race below) she won by a very large margin even after stopping twice. In other words, the VOR 70 rule allows significantly less development than does the Open 60 rule especially as regards appendages.

http://volvooceanrace.com/gallery/photos/2011-12/39#2

http://www.boatdesign.net/forums/sailboats/barcelona-world-race-open-60s-36089-5.html

http://www.boatdesign.net/forums/sailboats/open-60-using-curved-lifting-foils-35710.html

 

I think you will find the later boats will have a bit more form stability and probably a bit stiffer (meaning construction-wise rather than stability). Other than that things won't be dramatically different. They will not be 10% different in speed on most points of sail, in most conditions.

There are boats from each era that are outliers. I believe Silk Cut was a narrower, less form stability, less drag idea that didn't work out as well as hoped. On the other hand, the AmerSports One boat had perhaps too much form stability for all around performance.

However, for your purposes I would think any of the well built boats would be useful.


I'm assuming you do mean VO 60s, and not Open 60s as Stumble seems to be talking about. Two different animals there. No canting keels in the VO 60s.

 

Volvo 60s were one of the most prominent boats of their period and were definitely quite different to an Open 60 of their era. The Volvo 60s had water ballast, as did most of the Open 60s, but the Volvos were generally a more conservative design and more oriented towards upwind sailing and close reaching. I only sailed each type once but I can recall the Volvo felt much less dinghy-like (and was much less dinghy-like) and much more powerful.

 

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Thanks-I had pretty much forgotten that boat.

 

Paul , yes i do mean the volvo 60's , previous gen of 70 footers. Thanks for making it clear.

The common idea here then the 2001 gen is not than much faster than the first generation mark 1 boats. Does anyone have some performance figures we could compare, that would make thing a hell of a lot easier....

What are your comments on using one for race-corporate charter purposes ? A few yachtsmen around who claim ,if a yacht went around the world in a volvo ocean race, it is definitely not good to buy, they say there are so many points on where the boats structure will fail after pushing it that hard for so many consecutive days in the southern ocean. İ always had a firm belief that nothing major would go wrong with a kevlar built hull like that, the rest, keel connection ,mast,electronics...yeah, there will be some deficiencies but not a huge problem really.Any suggestions ?

 

There's a few in Sydney that are used for corporate charter and to take paying crews in the Sydney-Hobart and other races. They seem to do okay, as do the ex Round the World maxis that are used for charter around the Whitsundays, and they've been doing so for years.

 

I'm sure the boys at the Farr office would have VPPs of all the boats they did. Of course their boats won every year, so they should have the best info. They would probably also have some insight as to which boats might have had better construction for the type of sailing you plan to do.

Things can and did go wrong with those boats. Old raceboats need diligent care and upgrade/upkeep or they can be problematic. If you want to buy one you are probably better off buying one that is curently being cared for and raced with a decent budget, rather than buying a less expensive one that has been on the hard for a long period of time.

 

Volvo/Whitbread 60's are actually more like 65 foot length. They are also different to Open 60's in their weights; the lightest Opens, if I'm remembering correctly, around 8-9 tonnes while you can add around three more tonnes to the Volvo 60's. And Open 60's were early into canting keels whereas the VW's were always fixed.