We are in Cartagena, Spain, for the 4th and penultimate event of the 2011 AUDI Medcup and what better thing to do while waiting for the breeze to fill in than talk to Rob Weiland, TP52 class manager, about the present and future of the Med’s premier racing class.

VSail.info: We are now into the seventh year of the TP52 class. What is its current state of affairs?
Rob Weiland: We are small and healthy. Of course I would prefer for the fleet to be between 10 and 15 boats at this moment and we are currently eight. This is isn’t how I was seeing the future at the start of the year because at one stage we had a very good option of having 2-3 more boats but as you know John Cook fell very ill and cancelled this year. In fact he’s still fighting his way back out of cancer treatment.

We lost Team Origin in March and I still don’t have a very good reason for that. I think that they wanted to do too many things and there wasn’t enough time to do that much sailing on the side. Another boat was Pace that was looking to join us but at the end they decided to do a real IRC version of our boat and go and try to win IRC events. They did very well, so that was also a good choice for them.

For me personally it meant that we now have eight boats and if you lose one you are only left with seven and you are right at the edge.

VSail.info: Like is happening here in Cartagena, where we have seven boats since Gladiator is not racing.
Rob Weiland: Yes and I guess there must be a good reason for that. They aren’t able to be here and for us this is a disappointment but we hope to see them in Barcelona and in the TP52 Worlds.

VSail.info: The financial crisis seems to be affecting everybody in sailing. However, do you think an additional reason for the TP52 class to be losing owners is that it is expensive? AUDI owns the circuit and is also providing two boats but the rest are privately-owned.
Rob Weiland: We have discussed that a long time ago. For some owners it’s not an expensive class. If you are a Maxi owner, the TP52 is a third of the price, and a bigger Maxi is even more expensive. At the moment there is very little sponsored sailing. The America’s Cup is private money and most of the Extreme 40′s are privately funded, regardless of what logos they might have on their sails. We also have advertising on the TP52 sails but it still is private money behind it. Only in the Volvo Ocean Race and some single-handed sailing do you see truly sponsor-funded boats. This is also a sign of the times and it’s related to the crisis. However, we should never forget that private owners have always been a strong force and the backbone of top-level yacht racing and I don’t see it changing in the next few years.

Skype co-founder, Niklas Zennström, is one of the biggest names to switch from the Maxis to the TP52's. Cascais, 19 May 2011. Photo copyright Pierre Orphanidis / VSail.info

VSail.info: Sure, but there is a class, heavily focused on private owners as well, the RC44′s, that seem to be thriving, despite the crisis. Just last week they had an impressive 16 boats in Marstrand. Is Russell Coutts doing something better, is the class and its circuit more attractive than the TP52′s and the AUDI Medcup?
Rob Weiland: You know, two years ago you might have asked the same question but the other way round. Popularity and participation comes and goes. You practically have no owners that will stick with any class for 10-15 years. It’s sort of a movement. You see people going into the Farr40′s, then to the Swan 45′s, now you have people going into the Soto 40′s. In most of the cases, they do something for 4-5 years and then change, like they like to buy new or bigger cars. That’s how it goes.

Of course, the TP52′s have one difficulty in the sense it’s a box-rule class. You have to create your own boat, it’s not a one-design class. You just can’t pick up the phone, order one, choose a color and have it delivered. Those classes are easier to enter and you can have more boats on the starting line. Obviously, we are talking about very different budgets so you can’t really compare those two classes on a one-to-one basis. Having said that, it seems that Russell must be doing something right, otherwise they wouldn’t have 16 yachts in Sweden. However, many of the teams are connected to the America’s Cup, so there is another relation there but it seems he is providing a type of racing that appeals to a certain number of people.

VSail.info: Could the TP52 eventually become a one-design class?
Rob Weiland: No. There is a limit where one-design works and nobody has ever succeeded in having a one-design of 50 feet or bigger. It is a very dangerous area to go in and in our size, owners like to go to a designer and play with the room the rule gives them. One of the enormous strengths of the TP52 rule is that it is fully compatible with offshore racing anywhere in the world. There are MUCH more TP52′s on the water than RC44′s in the world because with an RC44 you cannot do anything at all outside of an official RC44 regatta. With our boats you can competitively race from China to Australia to America and then Europe.

VSail.info: Were there any TP52′s in the latest Fastnet?
Rob Weiland: There were two. The first one was Pace that withdrew from the race after having some problems with their mast and the other one was Franck Noel’s Near Miss. They had an excellent result, finishing first in Class 0 and fourth overall in IRC. Team Origin’s TP52 won the Cowes week in IRC Class 0 and Pace was second. Hooligan is currently leading the Hamilton Week race IRC Class A and Vesper is doing very well in the US. The TP52′s in general are doing very well as IRC 52 yachts and this is one of the things we have focused on in the last three years. Our aim was to bring the TP52 rule as close as possible to a perfect IRC boat. As a result, we have been modifying our box rule to give the TP52′s a second life but also allow mixed racing. You can now race in an AUDI Medcup event and next week go to the Copa del Rey and win it, without any modifications!

Franck Noel's TP52 Near Miss had a very successful Fastnet race, finishing first in IRC Class 0 and fourth in IRC overall. Photo copyright Daniel Foster / Rolex

It has taken us four years to slowly move to a fully IRC-compatible yacht. To demonstrate this, next year we are planning to invite IRC 52′s to come and race with us in 1-2 events of the AUDI Medcup. They will come to the event of their choice. They will race with the TP52 fleet but they will have a simplified box rule and their TCC (Time Correction Coefficient) will have to be as ours. They will be racing in real time not handicap! We might give them a bonus in terms of crew weight but we still have to work on that. They will not have to make any modifications if they have a longer bowsprit than our class rule allows as long as their TCC is the same as the rest of the TP52 fleet. There is a good interest in that and a couple of American boats will be coming in Europe. Powerplay and Vesper will be here to race in Capri, the Copa del Rey, maybe the Giraglia, and also a number of AUDI Medcup events.

On the other hand, we are contemplating taking 3-4 boats and going to the Key West. Quantum is now the main sponsor of the Key West and we want to support them but at the same time we could have a very good fleet of 12 IRC 52′s in Key West. It’s a very good promotion for the TP52 class and the event.

VSail.info: What about the future of the TP52 class? What’s in store for 2012?
Rob Weiland: We are talking to 5-6 new teams of which, in my view, 2 are achievable and 3 are reasonable new entries for next year. Most of them are Europeans but there is also interest from outside Europe. As you understand, it’s harder for them to do the full Medcup because it requires a lot of traveling. The final decisions are quite often taken late and last year we had people joining after the month of October, so there is still time before we have a clear picture.

We hope to keep Bribón in the fleet because it’s a very good IRC boat that has won the Copa del Rey three times in a row, which is quite an achievement. It is also doing well here, so it’s still competitive for a 2009-generation boat. We have to be realistic and I think that if we reach 10 boats it will be very good.

VSail.info: Last but not least, the first ever event of the 34th America’s Cup is now part of the sailing history. Do you see the advance of the multihulls as a threat to the TP52′s?
Rob Weiland: They took Team New Zealand from the AUDI Medcup but in any case I never expected them to be with us for 4 years. Still, there are teams that would have been with us such as Luna Rossa or Team Origin. I see there is a temporary movement to multihulls and like with every new toy, everybody is very excited. Once the toy is not so new, reality will kick in and you will see the limitations. Nevertheless, I watched the entire event.

VSail.info: Are there any novelties you think you could implement in the TP52 class and the AUDI Medcup circuit? Just to take an example, could you also use the new race courses here?
Rob Weiland: No, I don’t think it’s a good move. Right now, the type of sailing we do is less intended to make a show for television. We primarily want to have decent racing, with fair race courses, we will wait for the breeze to kick in and settle. We want to do a lot of things to make the sport accessible for television but I’m sure we don’t want to go as far as the America’s Cup went. The Medcup will always be more of a sailors event than the America’s Cup is right now.

For me it’s more of a show and they are trying to get back all the money invested in it. I will personally not be involved if the TP52 class and the Medcup decide to turn it into a show. I want it to be real sport and if they want to run a show they will have to look for somebody else and undoubtedly there will be people willing to take my place.

However, I cannot imagine that the real America’s Cup in the end will be only show. At the end of the day, you are there because you want to win the Cup and you will do everything to win it. I cannot imagine that you will want to lose the Cup because you simply want to make a show, where the race course and race venue are chosen solely because of the show. It will be a big gamble where you will need a lot of luck.

VSail.info: Still, what was wrong with the race course in the ACWS in Cascais? Race courses are conventions. You could have any race course you would like and still have real sport.
Rob Weiland: No, at the end it’s like the boat. Most sailors will tell you “Give me a boat that is equal to the next guy’s boat and I will beat him”. Most of them are very confident of their own skills but they want to be racing on a level playing field. The same is true with the race course. They don’t mind if it’s complicated but they don’t want it to be a slot machine! There should be some way to read the breeze and the current and it shouldn’t be changing every 30 seconds with strange and unpredictable events. I’m sure Dean Barker, Ben Ainslie and Iain Percy all want to race in a fair race course. They aren’t afraid of the adversaries, they are afraid of unpredictability.

If you are the world’s best team and you have all that money why throw it away on something so unpredictable? I don’t see that happening in the end and I see that they will have sense and take the show away from the shore and into fair water. Unless, of course, they realize they have no chance of winning and then bring the show back! I’m really curious though, I’m not negative about it. I watched it with great interest and tried to see what aspects of TV production we could use to improve what we do. I’m sure they are copying some stuff from us and it would be really stupid not to try to learn.

As the name of the TP52 circuit implies, AUDI has been its main backer since 2007. Cascais, 19 May 2011. Photo copyright Pierre Orphanidis / VSail.info