Dalton Picks Frers Design for Volvo Ocean Race

Grant Dalton Photo by Carlo Borlengi, www.seasee.it

Grant Dalton, skipper of the Nautor Challenge men's crew, announced
he will race the Volvo Ocean 60 designed by Nautor's Swan Frers design house.

Nautor Challenge, Nautor's Swan round the world racing team, has built two
new yachts in a bid to claim the most prestigious of ocean racing trophies,
the Volvo Ocean Race, previously Whitbread Round the World Race. One from
the drawing board of Milan-based Frers design office and the other from
Annapolis-based Farr Yacht Design. Stringent tests have been carried out on
both yachts over recent weeks to determine which yacht will be raced by the
men's team, skippered by Grant Dalton and which yacht will be entered by the
women's team, skippered by Lisa McDonald.

Dalton commented; "It's appropriate that we'll be racing the V.O.60 designed
by Swan's designers. We'll be aiming to use this to emulate Swan 65 Sayula
II's victory in the first ever Whitbread in 1973/74."

Lisa McDonald. Photo by Simon Palfrader, www.seasee.it.

Dalton went on to say; "We have hard data on the performance of each boat in
various conditions. We have taken that data and run it against weather data
from previous races. It was close between the two boats. Some years the
Frers would have won and in others it would have been the Farr."

Photo by Carlo Borlengi, www.seasee.it

He continued; "Then we ran our performance data against data on the weather
likely to be encountered from September 23. This is where accurate data
comes into contact with knowledge of historic weather, intuition, gut
feeling and to an extent, crystal ball gazing.

"In the end it was a subjective decision. We could have played it safe and
taken the Farr boat because the Farr people are very experienced designers
to the V.O.60 rule and we knew we would have a boat which is equal to the
other Farr boats in the fleet. The other option was to go with the Frers
design because in the testing it has shown the potential to be a hard boat
to beat."

Photo by Carlo Borlengi, www.seasee.it

Frers design team has been the design house for Nautor's Swan for many years.

Swans that have competed in previous Whitbread Round the World Races:

Model	Name	Designer	Race year	Final	Nationality	Skipper
55/012	Tauranga	S&S Design	1973-74	10	Italian	Eric Pascoli
55	Walross III Berlin	S&S Design	1981-82	18	D.F.R.	Michel Hahn Reichardt
57/028	Berge Viking	S&S Design	1981-82	8	Norway	Peter Lunde
57/047	Shadow of Switzerland	S&S Design	1985-86	12	Switzerland	Otto & Nora Zehender - Muller
65/003	Sayula II	S&S Design	1973-74	1	Mexico	Ramon Carlin
65	Kings Legend	S&S Design	1977-78	2	GB	Nick Ratcliffe & Mike Clancy
65	Disque D'Or	S&S Design	1977-78	4	Switzerland	Pierre Fehlmann
65	ADC Accutrac	S&S Design	1977-78	5	GB	Clare Francis
65	Xargo III	S&S Design	1981-82	6	South Africa	Padda Kuttel
651/11	Fazer Finland	Frers Design	1985-86	3	Finland	Michael Berner