Sport: Won in the Tank

• Share

"They ought to haul Sceptre up for good," said a top U.S. yachtsman, "and plant geraniums in her cockpit." In the wake of Columbia's embarrassingly thorough, four-straight conquest of Britain's Sceptre by an average margin of 8 min. 43 sec.† off Newport, R.I. last week, sailing buffs asked: Why had the America's Cup races produced such an astounding mismatch?

The answer seemed to lie in the complicated formula of twelve-meter-boat design, basically the art of making improvements on existing models. U.S. Designer Olin Stephens improved on the best there was: Vim, a 19-year-old Stephens creation that swept the class back in 1939. Britain's David Boyd, in his first attempt at a twelve-meter, had to improve principally on Evaine, an old British boat that Vim trounced in 1939.

A seasoned crew headed by Helmsman Briggs Cunningham handled the victor with professional skill, but the races were apparently decided months before in a special testing tank at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, NJ. There, Olin Stephens tested various scale-model hull designs under all kinds of simulated speeds and heels. He went ahead to develop on the drawing board the graceful contour lines that turned out to be Columbia. (The British were testing, too—and in tanks patterned after those of the Stevens Institute.)

From the tested model, Stephens designed a sleek, hard-charging champion that beat beautifully to windward, cut cleanly through the sea. Britain's Boyd built a barrel-chested challenger that bobbed too much in rough weather, slid off badly to windward. White-haired Cornelius ("Corny") Shields, Columbia's tactician during last summer's trials, put his racing-wise finger on Sceptre's big shortcoming: "She's too full forward and too fine aft."

Designer Boyd admitted frankly that he had slipped on Sceptre, said that if he ever got the chance to design another twelve-meter, "I think I'll go ask Olin Stephens to let me have a look at the lines of Columbia." But Stephens made it plain that the champion's blueprints will remain a secret, just as Vim's have all these years.