Inside View on BMW Oracle’s Wing Rig

Andy Rice | November 12, 2009

SailJuice spoke to Mike Drummond the morning after the first day of sailing for the wing rig. Here’s the first part of the interview. Click on the link at the bottom to listen to the audio for the meaty, technical stuff …

SailJuice: Mike, you and the team put the wing rig on the trimaran for the first time yesterday. How is it going so far?

Mike Drummond: Well, I would have to say that things are going pretty well because 12 hours from rolling it out of the garage to actually sailing where we were starting to overrun the chase boats. It has exceeded our expectations because there were many steps along the way where things could have gone wrong, but so far it’s working out very well.

SailJuice: You must have your heart in your mouth at times like this, with so much at stake and working with such new and untested technology.

Mike Drummond: It has certainly been heart-in-mouth stuff at some stages. We obviously made the decision a long time ago to do this wing rig. It was recommended on the basis of some theoretical work, but before hardly any design work had been done. So, since then we have mostly been kind of living with that risk that it might not be that fast or that we might have problems we had not foreseen. But you know, you get your head down, you do the work and hopefully it all works out – and that is how it is so far.

SailJuice: And you actually flew the central hull on day one?

Mike Drummond: Yes. We were sailing in the harbour with a relatively soft breeze, so we did not fly for very long, but flying the hull is a maximum load scenario, so we are pretty happy with that as a structural test, it has obviously got enough power to do so.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO THE COMPLETE INTERVIEW WITH MIKE DRUMMOND….