Sailing Magazine
Maria Muina
The seven One Design VOR 65s were built by a consortium led by Green Marine in the UK. The first of those for the Team SCA women wad delivered in October 2013, the last was supplied to Team Vestas Wind in August 2014.
Since the end of Race Zero, the boats have been out of the water, here in Alicante on the Spanish coast, with a team of Volvo Ocean Race Boatyard shipwrights making sure all the boats were strictly one design and that the number of modifications were applied identically on all the boats.
Yesterday we talked to Knut Frostad, the Volvo Ocean Race CEO about changes made to all the boats in the final upgrade and maintenance program just being competed.
Frostad explained ‘We were very pleased with the small number of overall changes we had to make to boats.
‘I had contemplated we would be forced to make a lot more because we wanted to build a full scale sailable prototype that we could test but we didn’t have the time to do it.
‘We made a prototype of the interior. We made a prototype of the deck that we could work on that in a one to one scale. Normally when you launch one of these offshore racing boats whether it is an America’s Cup boat or a Volvo Ocean Race boat they are always half finished when they launch and then they start sailing with them and they change and they rebuild and they move and they get everything right.
‘We just couldn’t do that because then it wouldn’t be a one design boat. Our ambition was to get it 90% correct in everything and then knowing that some things would probably not be perfect.
Green Marine
Details of the galley on board Volvo Ocean 65 Dongfeng – Volvo Ocean Race – Ian Roman / Volvo Ocean Race Click Here to view large photo
‘The great thing was the things that were not perfect were mostly just practical things. They were not really performance related, for example the galley. We made a mistake with the galley. It wasn’t really a user friendly galley. It was actually quite hopeless to cook from.
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