Grueling 39K-Mile Yacht Race Tests the Sanity of Cramped Crews

Photo: Gilles Martin-Raget/Team Alvimedica

Photo: Gilles Martin-Raget/Team Alvimedica

Photo: Tim Moynihan

Photo: Volvo Ocean Race

Photo: Daniel Forster/Team Alvimedica

Photo: Daniel Forster/Team Alvimedica

Photo: Gilles Martin-Raget/Team Alvimedica

Photo: Gilles Martin-Raget/Team Alvimedica

Photo: Daniel Forster/Team Alvimedica

Photo: Daniel Forster/Team Alvimedica

The idea of sailing around the world seems a bit iffy, even on a huge luxury liner with hot meals, cold alcohol, ample shuffleboard, and a decent bed. The idea turns horrific when you’re talking about doing it on a 65-foot sailing yacht with no fresh food, no shower, a narrow net of a bed, one change of clothes, and a single “toilet” the size and shape of a mixing bowl.

(P.S. You need to share that micro-toilet with seven other people.)

This is what the members of Team Alvimedica have signed up for. Led by skipper Charlie Enright and general manager Mark Towill, they’ll make up one of six competing teams in the Volvo Ocean Race, widely considered the toughest sailing race in the world.

The 2014-15 edition of the race, which takes place every three years, will cover 39,000 miles, hit six continents, and run from October to June. This is the first time it will be a “one-design” race: All entrants must use a specially designed boat—the $6 million Volvo 65—with the same exact specifications. The new carbon-fiber boat, designed by Farr Yacht Design in Annapolis, Md. specifically for the next two Volvo Ocean Races and assembled in different spots around the world, are strong and sturdy.

The idea is that giving everyone the same boat will keep teams from sacrificing safety features at the expense of speed. That’s not an idle worry: The race has claimed the lives of five sailors in its 41-year history. That doesn’t mean the boats are slow. With two sails, the 65-foot long craft can hit 30 knots (34.5 mph).

The identical boats will emphasize sailing skills, which could make this year’s race more competitive than ever. Teams will be evenly matched off the starting line. Once on the water, they monitor the weather to determine the exact route they want to take and which sails to use (Team Alvimedica will bring seven options to choose from). Depending on their choices, the boats may end up close together for some of the legs.

Each of the Volvo Ocean Race’s nine legs is treated as an independent races with points allotted for the top finishers. At each port stop, the boats compete in shorter sprint races. The in-port races are used as tiebreakers if there’s a dead heat in the overall competition.

Volvo Ocean Race

No creature comforts

The boat may be safer than ever this year, but it offers little in the way of temperature control and sleep-friendliness. The cramped innards house a communications center, a video-editing lab, sleeping quarters (basically hammocks), and the head (a very non-private toilet). Enright says the temperature down there is either “really really hot or really really cold.” Carbon fiber doesn’t exactly dampen noise, so the cramped below-deck quarters pound constantly with the sound of waves hitting the hull.

We checked out Team Alvimedica’s boat on a gorgeous 80-degree day in New York City. It was a scorching, claustrophobic slice of hell. A tiny electric fan mounted to the right of the boat’s navigation center—a couple of ThinkPads with a cable-suspended seat in front—provided a sip of relief. It’s hard to imagine what would help if it were cold. There is no fireplace.

Obstacles

Each stage of the race is its own unique flavor of nightmare, from typhoons off the southern coast of China, dodging steamships in Malaysia, pirates near Somalia, and a combination of massive waves, powerful winds, and gigantic icebergs in the southernmost stretch of the competition. The first leg will take the teams Alicante, Spain to Cape Town, South Africa—a 6,487-mile jaunt that will last more than three weeks. The teams will swing so far west after passing through the Strait of Gibraltar, they’ll practically scrape the coast of Brazil. Then they loop back east to Cape Town. It’s not the most-direct route, but it may get them there the fastest thanks to the trade winds. As an added bonus, the route should also steer them clear of potential pirate attacks off the west coast of Africa.

If the competitors can duck and dodge their way through all of that, they’ll still need to make sure they don’t run out of food. That requires careful planning. Too much food will add unwanted weight to the boat. Too little of it would be disastrous during a slower-than-expected leg. During the last Volvo Ocean Race, the American PUMA Ocean Racing team ran out of food a day and a half from port on one leg.

But no matter how much food they bring, it will not be delicious. It’ll be freeze-dried everything, little packets of blech that won’t replenish the crazy amount of calories each crew burns on board. It’s no shock that the first thing the team will do when they get to each port is eat actual food, “or maybe get a blood test,” says Enright.

Tim Moynihan

When things go bad

When you’re stuck on a boat for weeks with a small crew, personnel decisions are a big deal. Substitutions are allowed between legs—and boats rarely finish the race with the same crew they had at the start—but while on the water, you’re stuck with whomever you’ve got. So each team builds a roster loaded with specialists who can deal with whatever happens: An electrician, a sailmaker, a medic, maybe a bowman or a strong grinder for the winches. A media specialist will also be on each boat to edit together video, as well as an embedded onboard reporter who’s only allowed to report, cook, and clean. It’ll be all-hands-on-deck, except for that reporter.

If something does go horribly wrong, the teams are on their own for a little while. The sailing yachts won’t be followed by chase boats and they’re often thousands of miles from land. In 2012, the mast of Team PUMA’s boat snapped in three places in the middle of the Southern Atlantic Ocean and ended up on Tristan da Cunha, the most remote inhabited island on the planet.

The boats are tracked: Every five minutes, Volvo Ocean Race officials will receive an update of each boat’s location, and the boats are certainly equipped for several forms of communication. A few Inmarsat Sailor satellite antennas are in the back of each boat: A large unit used for beefier transmissions, such as sending video from the boat via satellite. A second, smaller Inmarsat Sailor antenna will be used for less-demanding data delivery: Text messages and e-mails back home. Ordering a pizza probably won’t work.

There will also be five video cameras on board, including a pair mounted to the mast, and they’ll be rolling at all times. Not all the footage will be saved, however. Instead, there will be a buffer of at least 30 minutes so that the ship’s media crew member can review footage in case anything goes wrong, and to have more leeway when editing together montages. The mast-mounted cameras are controlled from below the deck, with a panel that can swap cameras, operate the zoom on each of them, and move them around. There’s also a Panasonic Toughpad the team can use on deck to see what’s happening, and remotely control the navigation system below.

According to Enright, the yachts were practically designed around one of the many cameras, a live-stream-capable module above the hatch that’s also equipped with a microphone for chatting. There won’t be a live-stream from the boat’s cameras, so you’re out of luck if you want to follow along with them for nine months straight. But you can follow them with an online map, and the media crew member will be editing videos aboard the ship and can send produced packages to TV stations via satellite.

The toughest part of the race will likely be the fifth and longest leg—the 6,776-mile, iceberg-infested stretch in the Southern Ocean from New Zealand to Brazil. “There, it’s not about going fast, it’s about controlling the crew and the boat,” says Enright, who anticipates filling the boat’s ballast tanks during that leg to slow the boat down and keep it more manageable. “To finish first, you must first finish.”

The prize for finishing first? Zero dollars. Each boat’s crew members are professional sailors that will be paid by their teams, but there’s no jackpot at the end of this grueling race.

The trophies aren’t too bad, though.

Ingenious Self-Driving Vehicle Saves Lives by Detecting Roadside Bombs

Oshkosh Defense

Improvised explosive devices, mines, and other kinds of roadside bombs are a major threat to U.S. troops serving overseas. That may be about to change, and not just because we’re pulling out of Afghanistan.

U.S. defense contractor Oshkosh Defense already keeps soldiers away from harm with the M-ATV, an armored vehicle specially designed to resist blasts from IEDs and mines. Even better, it detects explosives using special ground penetrating radar and a 12-wheeled mineroller which attaches to the front of the M-ATV.

But that’s not quite good enough: Oshkosh wants to move soldiers even further from the danger zone by putting them in another vehicle entirely and making the minesweeping truck drive itself. Minesweeping is a “very dangerous job where unmanned ground vehicle technology could have a big payoff in saving lives,” says John Beck, head engineer for Oshkosh’s Unmanned Systems group.

Self-Driving Warriors

The company has spent a decade developing an autonomous driving technology called TerraMax, which can be applied to vehicles already on the road. You may recognize it from Top Gear, where it was installed on Oshkosh’s six-wheeled cargo truck, the MTVR MK25A1. TerraMax came to life in 2004 as a competitor in the DARPA Grand Challenge, a 150-mile race across the California desert designed to spur development of autonomous vehicles. It did well in the great robot race and has since evolved into a more advanced and versatile platform.

It’s now equipped with radar and LIDAR, which uses lasers to detect nearby objects, along with a drive-by-wire system that electronically controls engine speed, transmission, braking, and steering. The system does more than steer and hit the throttle and brakes. It can intelligently control a central tire inflation system and driveline locks to navigate deep sand or mud, all without any input from the operator.

Oshkosh Defense

TerraMax works pretty much like the self-driving cars Google and others are developing for civilian use, adapted for use in much tougher conditions. Google can carefully map roads before its vehicle ever tackles them on its own. The big automakers can make their vehicles recognize lane markings and speed limit signs. Oshkosh doesn’t have those advantages. So it made TerraMax capable of combining overhead imagery from satellites and planes with standard military maps generated through geographic information systems. That lets where soldiers define roads and other obstacles, much like with a commercial GPS system.

Once given a defined course, either through waypoints along a route or with just a final destination, the vehicles can navigate themselves. Operators can set things like vehicle speed and following distance. They have access to a live map of the entire convoy and receive diagnostic reports on vehicles.

These aren’t entirely autonomous vehicles, at least not yet. If they reach an impasse of some kind, they can alert an operator farther back in the convoy and ask what to do. One operator can monitor up to five vehicles, Oshkosh says, a number chosen through warfighter feedback. Even with that limit, TerraMax achieves two objectives. It allows the military to move more cargo with fewer personnel. And it makes a convoy look like it’s carrying more personnel than it really is, which could discourage an enemy from attacking.

Oshkosh’s unmanned vehicle technology is still in testing, but the company has spent the last three years working with the Marine Corp Warfighting Lab and the Office of Naval Research to get it ready for the battlefield. It’s not the only military-grade autonomous technology in development. Lockheed Martin is working on something it calls the Autonomous Mobility Appliqué System, which also allows for autonomous or semi-autonomous operation in a convoy.

Autonomous Minesweeping

TerraMax can be applied to just about anything that drives, though modern vehicles work better because they have more computers to work with. To teach a vehicle to search for roadside bombs instead of simply drive along, Oshkosh just has to change the software.

Britain’s Most Glorious Cold War Bomber Jet Takes Flight Again

Oh, and there's an air show. The Avro Vulcan, a Cold War era British nuclear bomber, flew over Goodwood in 2013 and will appear again this year. Photo: Jeff Bloxham

Oh, and there's an air show. The Avro Vulcan, a Cold War era British nuclear bomber, flew over Goodwood in 2013 and will appear again this year.

Photo: Jeff Bloxham

To raise money, Vulcan to the Sky Trust raffled off the chance to fly in a Spitfire, alongside the Vulcan. Photo: Newspress

To raise money, Vulcan to the Sky Trust raffled off the chance to fly in a Spitfire, alongside the Vulcan.

Photo: Newspress

XH558, the last Vulcan that still flies, lands at Doncaster on June 2nd, 2014. Photo: Newspress

XH558, the last Vulcan that still flies, lands at Doncaster on June 2nd, 2014.

Photo: Newspress

Engineers used 3D scanning to make necessary modifications to the Vulcan's wings. Photo: Newspress

Engineers used 3D scanning to make necessary modifications to the Vulcan's wings.

Photo: Newspress

Computer modeling techniques borrowed from the auto industry were used as well. Photo: Newspress

Computer modeling techniques borrowed from the auto industry were used as well.

Photo: Newspress

Photo: Brian Mullender/Flickr

Photo: Brian Mullender/Flickr

Photo: Peter Gronemann/Flickr

Photo: Peter Gronemann/Flickr

Photo: Matthew Harrigan/Flickr

Photo: Matthew Harrigan/Flickr

Photo: Adrian .../Flickr

The last Avro Vulcan, one of the coolest warplanes of the Cold War era, takes to the skies again this weekend.

The plane, born of the days when the world seemed constantly under threat of nuclear war, was meticulously overhauled some time ago, but has flown intermittently because keeping it aloft is so expensive. The nonprofit Vulcan to the Sky Trust, which owns and operates the plane, is bringing it out again for the Goodwood Festival of Speed.

The Vulcan was the world’s first delta-wing bomber, a long-range aircraft developed in the 1950s to give Britain the ability to drop a nuke or two on Russia should we ever reach DefCon 2. It never came to that, of course, and the plane didn’t see combat until the early 1980s when the UK went to war with Argentina over the Falkland Islands.

Although officially designated the Hawker Siddeley Vulcan (Avro was a subsidiary), the plane is more affectionately known as the “tin triangle.” The distinctive design is especially efficient at high speeds, and the Vulcan could do 580 mph at 50,000 feet. It could be refueled in midair, giving it virtually unlimited range.

The Vulcan entered service in May 1956, and flew in the RAF’s nuclear deterrent force until 1969. Soviet missile advances ultimately made the jet—which relied upon speed and high altitude for defense—obsolete as a nuclear bomber.

It wasn’t until the Falklands War of 1982 that the Vulcan was called into combat. To make it and other aircraft useful against Argentina—which was thousands of miles away and didn’t merit being hit with a nuclear bomb—the RAF had to make a series of design changes, and quickly.

Engineers converted the bomb bays to hold conventional, 1,000-pound bombs. They added electronic countermeasure pods to blind Argentine radars. They tuned the Vulcan’s engines to deliver full thrust on takeoff because the jet would be operating above its max weight. And they did it all in under two months. The Vulcans bombed the islands throughout May 1982. Martin Withers, one of the pilots on those missions, will fly the Vulcan at Goodwood this weekend.

The 134 Vulcans in the RAF fleet were retired later that year. Most were scrapped or burned to provide something for firefighters to practice on, according to Thunder & Lightnings, a site dedicated to the history of British aircraft. The RAF held onto a few for posterity’s sake, including XH558, the plane flying this weekend at Goodwood.

The government sold XH558 in 1993; it eventually landed in the hands of the nonprofit Vulcan to the Sky Trust.

It isn’t easy or cheap to fly an obsolete airplane; as time goes on, engineering know-how and parts become harder to come by. Vulcan to the Sky had to raise £6.5 million ($11.06 million) to make XH558 airworthy, and had it airborne in August, 2007.

Two years ago, the group announced XH558 would make its final flight in 2013, but the group managed to raise another £400,000 ($681,000) to modify the wings and keep it flying through 2015.

The Speed Fest Whose Terrible Race Track Scares Away F1 Stars

Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason paid $34 million for this Ferrari 250 GTO and took it to Goodwood in 2012. Photo: Newspress

Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason paid $34 million for this Ferrari 250 GTO and took it to Goodwood in 2012.

Photo: Newspress

The Festival of Speed attracts a lot of very cool vehicles, including the Porsche 917 racecar. Photo: Newspress

The Festival of Speed attracts a lot of very cool vehicles, including the Porsche 917 racecar.

Photo: Newspress

Some drivers have a bit of fun as they start the uphill race. Photo: Newspress

Some drivers have a bit of fun as they start the uphill race.

Photo: Newspress

Same goes for motorcycle riders. Here's a Ducati 1199 Panigale at Goodwood in 2012. Photo: Newspress

Same goes for motorcycle riders. Here's a Ducati 1199 Panigale at Goodwood in 2012.

Photo: Newspress

This Ferrari F60 focused on speed. Photo: Newspress

This Ferrari F60 focused on speed.

Photo: Newspress

A Maserati burns some rubber at Goodwood in 2011. Photo: Newspress

A Maserati burns some rubber at Goodwood in 2011.

Photo: Newspress

The event has a historic focus, which explains why a 1927 Bentley 4.5 Liter Blower was on the track. Photo: Newspress

The event has a historic focus, which explains why a 1927 Bentley 4.5 Liter Blower was on the track.

Photo: Newspress

A 1803 London Steam Carriage made an appearance in 2013. Goodwood

A 1803 London Steam Carriage made an appearance in 2013.

Goodwood

Oh, and there's an air show. The Avro Vulcan, a Cold War era British nuclear bomber, flew over Goodwood in 2013 and will appear again this year. Photo: Jeff Bloxham

Oh, and there's an air show. The Avro Vulcan, a Cold War era British nuclear bomber, flew over Goodwood in 2013 and will appear again this year.

Photo: Jeff Bloxham

But really, it's about the cars. Photo: Newspress

But really, it's about the cars.

Photo: Newspress

Ferrari always has a strong presence. This F10-1 showed up in 2011. Photo: Newspress

Ferrari always has a strong presence. This F10-1 showed up in 2011.

Photo: Newspress

A Ferrari 250 MM takes the first corner of the climb. Photo: Newspress

A Ferrari 250 MM takes the first corner of the climb.

Photo: Newspress

Photo: Newspress

Photo: Newspress

Here's a 1952 Jaguar XK120 Montlhery. Photo: Newspress

Here's a 1952 Jaguar XK120 Montlhery.

Photo: Newspress

And a 1954 Mercedes-Benz W196. Goodwood

And a 1954 Mercedes-Benz W196.

Goodwood

A 1970 Shadow AVS Chevrolet MKI took on the hill climb last year. Goodwood

A 1970 Shadow AVS Chevrolet MKI took on the hill climb last year.

Goodwood

The 250 GTO may not have the record time, but it's hard to find anything that looks better at Goodwood. Photo: Newspress

The 250 GTO may not have the record time, but it's hard to find anything that looks better at Goodwood.

Photo: Newspress

The Goodwood Festival of Speed sounds like something a delinquent teenage aristocrat might do when his parents leave town: Invite 100,000 or so people to his 17th-century mansion and turn the winding driveway into a race track.

The Festival of Speed, which runs through Sunday, is among the coolest events on the automotive calendar. Historic and brand new vehicles have since 1993 made an annual pilgrimage to the Goodwood estate in West Sussex, England, to race or just show off. The event includes an air show, vehicle debuts, and parties, but the highlight is the hill climb: One at a time, cars sprint up a 1.16-mile course that any sane person would call a driveway.

Goodwood is a gorgeous setting for dangerous activity that makes other car shows look uptight. The winding one-lane road is lined with trees, stone walls and foliage that makes seeing anything tricky. Each year, top automotive minds design limited edition cars and turn them over to drivers who attack the track’s nine turns and 300-plus feet of elevation change. There’s nothing easy about this. Take, for example, the turn called Molecomb: After a blind ascent, drivers must cope with shadows cast by trees, making it hard to see—and avoid—the flint wall just ahead.

The difficulty of the course is one reason the track record hasn’t been topped in 15 years. In 1999, German racer Nick Heidfeld drove a McLaren MP4-13 F1 car to the finish line in 41.6 seconds (video below). Recalling the run in 2011, Martin Whitmarsh, at the time the McLaren team boss, told the The Telegraph he’d instructed Heidfeld make the run at top speed. “The moment he attacked that first corner,” Whitmarsh said, “I began to hope he’d make it to the top. What I’d said to him at the start was totally unreasonable.”

Driving a Formula One car all-out on a course where runoff areas are dotted with tree trunks and cushioning material consists of hay bales could make for catastrophic accidents. So Whitmarsh spoke with festival founder and organizer Lord Charles March, and they agreed that modern Formula 1 cars would no longer be officially timed for competition along the course.

The lack of official recognition hasn’t stopped drivers from taking F1 cars to the course, but without the chance to break a record as incentive to push the limits of traction and helmet protection, the chances of a serious accident are diminished. They still happen, however; we saw a Lamborghini concept buy it last year. Lots of cars still take the course, but they can’t match the power and speed of the McLaren. So don’t expect Heidfield’s record to be broken anytime soon.

That doesn’t mean the festival is now a bore. Goodwood and its bonkers course remain a stage on which major manufacturers can show off ludicrous hyper-tuned creations.

Here’s what to look for this year.

The British (Indian, really) marques will be making home-turf debuts. Land Rover will show a Ranger Rover SVR that will make 542 horsepower and be controlled with an eight-speed automatic gearbox, while Jaguar will bring its most powerful car ever: a carbon fiber-clad F-Type called the Project 7. It’ll have a specially-tuned 5.0-liter V-8 that will make 575 horsepower, 25 more than the F-Type R. Jag is planning to produce 250 examples of the Project 7 for consumers enticed by its hill climb performance. We’ll take one in British racing green.

Bentley will be arriving with a special Continental called the GT3-R which will have a production run of 300, Spartan-style. Its 4.0-litre twin-turbo V-8 will put out 572 brake horsepower, which will send the two-door from zero to 60 mph in a manufacturer-claimed 3.6 seconds. Fellow VW Group brand Audi will be bringing out their limited-run R8 LMX with its 5,500 Kelvin laser high-beams. Ninety-nine of these will be made and will sell for just over $270,000.

McLaren, the marque that set the aforementioned course record, is bringing a special edition of their “budget” model called the 650S MSO (McLaren Special Operations). They’ll be making 25 coupes and 25 convertibles, selling for $430,000 and $465,00. We’re more anxious to see their unveiling of a yet-to-be-named track-only vehicle. We’re hoping for the rumored P1 GTR, but expect a more subdued race-only 650S.

For the less aristocratic crowd, there will be hatchbacks. Awesome hatchbacks. Ford is revealing the updated version of the much-loved Focus ST, and Fiat will be sending a mental 187 bhp Abarth.

If you can’t make it to England by the end of the weekend, enjoy the photos above and this video of Heidfield’s record run.