THE BOAT: CONCEPT

In conventional monohulls and multihulls the leverage of the sail force is countered only by a weight/buoyancy leverage. This results in a very definite limits to stability in both the roll and pitch directions. Many speed record attempt designs suffer from the 2 principal side effects of this limitation – limited drive force and unsteady response to gusts.

Vestas SailRocket employs a wholly different concept (first documented by Bernard Smith in the 1960s’) in which the sail and keel elements are positioned so that there is virtually no overturning moment and no net vertical lift. When used correctly this concept results in a boat which no longer has obvious stability limits and in which the only significant response to gusts is a change in speed!