Getting crowded

Latest to enter the frenetic fray of the Class 40 is Humphreys Yacht Design. Tom Humphreys describes the office's typically innovative approach to this formidable and still expanding offshore fleet

With 30 boats competing in last autumn's Transat Jacques Vabre and over 60 actively sailing worldwide, the Class 40 is a pretty exciting fleet to be involved in right now, and we at HYD are looking forward to the launch of our first design. The Orca 40 is being series-produced in Slovenia by the Ocean Tec Company and boat number one is due for launch as this issue hits your desk.

The timing of the Orca 40 design has been such that it has benefited enormously from research and development carried out on our Volvo 70 design for Team ­Russia, yielding a range of synergies that have helped to create an innovative Class 40 that is expected to have first-class performance characteristics.

Performance optimisation has been based heavily on meteorological profiles for the transoceanic classics, such as the Route du Rhum and Transat, working closely with Jure Jerman from the Slovenian Met Office who has also worked closely with us on the Volvo project. Our development work for the Orca 40 commenced with a thorough investigation of the current fleet. A number of emulations of competitive Class 40 designs were modelled and run through our VPP to determine each design's strengths and weaknesses. The next phase of development work involved the analysis of a systematic series of candidate hull designs, looking primarily at the trade-off between form stability and wetted surface area through the variation of overall beam, waterline beam and rocker profile. These were run through our VPP, into which we had fed the meteorological profiles for the various trans-Atlantic races which gave us a strong basis from which to rank our candidate designs...

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