Volvo Ocean Race - Baltimore, Annapolis, Sandy Point

The Master of Boat Couture
Annapolis Yacht Designer Dominates Race Around the World

By Manuel Roig-Franzia
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, April 20, 2002

Hardly anyone makes a fuss about the people who design Michelle Kwan's ice skates. The hard-working souls who sweat over the shape of Jeff Gordon's NASCAR land rockets labor in virtual anonymity.

But the world of big-time yacht racing is different. Here, amid the howling wind and the towering egos, designers are superstars. They hire press agents, entangle themselves in headline-grabbing controversies and command astronomical fees.

The undisputed king of the designers is Bruce Farr, a supremely confident and sometimes prickly New Zealander who operates a secretive design firm in sailing-obsessed Annapolis. Farr's boats win major championships with monotonous regularity. But it is his mastery of the around-the-world Volvo Ocean Race, which arrived in Baltimore on Thursday and stops in Annapolis on Friday before continuing across the Atlantic, that boggles the imagination.

He designed the last four winners of the prestigious 37,630-mile race. The last three second-place finishers, too. Oh, he also designed the last three third-place finishers.

When the teams were forming for this year's race, one competitor, Richard Brisius of the Assa Abloy team, said "it would be irresponsible" not to consult with Farr. The designer develops whiz-bang innovations long before each race. Then he offers prospective clients a basic, off-the-shelf design or pricier, customized versions.

Six of eight teams in this year's race found Farr's high-velocity promises irresistible. Among them are Assa Abloy, which bought a basic design, and the race-leading illbruck team, which went for a custom blueprint.

The teams come to Farr with buckets of cash -- up to $500,000 for a Volvo blueprint -- because he almost always wins. He wins long races and short ones. He wins with big boats and little ones. In Europe, in the Americas, in New Zealand.

He wins everything, that is, except the biggest of them all -- the America's Cup -- where his failures are as mythic as his triumphs everywhere else. Yet Farr's woeful Cup performance hasn't scared off Oracle software titan Larry Ellison, who is throwing somewhere between $10 million and $20 million at the Annapolis firm to design a dream boat for next year's race.

A designer like Farr gets hyped because his technical wizardry can be just as important as the skill of the sailors. Without formal engineering training or a college degree, Farr revolutionized yacht racing in the 1970s by concocting frighteningly lightweight and highly maneuverable boats.His creations withstood ferocious conditions and blasted through walls of wind that would have crushed less ingenious designs.

He became the sailing world's rebel genius, pushing the limits of the arcane rules that governed a stodgy sport. His personality contributed to the allure.

He could be standoffish, prominent sailors said. He didn't slap backs and guzzle beers. Farrguarded his privacy. At times, he made big-shot syndicate organizers practically beg for his services.

"Bruce Farr plays a little hard to get," said John Marshall, who hired Farr for the New York Yacht Club's ill-fated 1999 America's Cup challenge. "You have to come on bended knee."

Farr convinces the cockiest sailors that they need him. "If we do a superb design," he preaches, "an average sailor can win."

Now, few designers play in Farr's league, and less than a handful could even be called rivals -- Germán Frers, Laurie Davidson and Doug Petersonamong them.

"They're all artistes," Marshall said. "The best are enormously gifted, driven, compulsive. They don't always make good bedfellows. . . . You can't live with 'em, you can't live without 'em."

The Inner Sanctum
Farr's Annapolis office looks out over a marina thick with masts in America's sailing mecca. The second-floor design suite is sacrosanct. Sailors speak of it jealously because they can almost never go inside. It houses too many secrets.

"Everything is hush-hush," said George Collins, the retired T. Rowe Price chief executive who commissioned Farr to design a Maryland-based boat, Chessie Racing, for the last around-the-world race. "I've only been up there a couple of times myself. . . . Even the people on the first floor talk about it. It helps with the Bruce Farr mystique."

Farr, 51, can be deceiving with his bookish looks and muted demeanor. He glides through an office filled with pulsing computer screens without making eye contact, almost invisible. When he speaks, though, he fills the room, his words engendered with utter authority. Normally bombastic sailors marvel at his command of yachting vernacular. They come to his office to listen, not to talk.

Farr is lean and sturdy with the telltale sun-splotched neckline of a man who has spent his life on the sea. His unwavering obsession with secrecy has practical roots.

He got a jump on his competitors in the early 1990s by investing $150,000 of his own money -- designers usually use their clients' dough -- to research a new class of boats that would become the exclusive entrants in the around-the-world race, then known as the Whitbread. The race previously had been open to a variety of sailboat types.

When word got out about Farr's tinkering, everyone wanted to hire him. But as his client list grew, some wondered how Farr could design boats simultaneously for teams that were competing against each other.

The sailors, who provide Farr with wind projections to help in the design process, worried that "their good ideas might end up in somebody else's boat," Farr recalled.

Farr and his right-hand man, childhood friend G. Russell Bowler, calmed them by talking about "fire walls" that would keep each team's design work separate. Farr compares the approach to doctor-patient confidentiality.

It worked. The clients streamed in. By the 1997-98 race, Farr could claim eight of the top nine finishers. Around-the-world racing had become his plaything.

Fighting the Establishment
Farr lives in a waterfront home in Annapolis with his wife, Gail. He came to Maryland in 1981 from Auckland, New Zealand, lured by the coveted, big-money projects in North America and Europe.

By then, Farr already had a storied and controversial legacy. His lightweight designs were all the rage in the 1970s, but they befuddled sailing's entrenched establishment, which had long operated in a universe populated by heavier boats that traveled well upwind but didn't perform as well when the wind was behind them.

"The rulesmakers spent most of the '70s trying to change their formulations so his boats didn't have an advantage," said John Burnham, editor of Sailing World magazine.

Farr had applied some of the same ideas that propelled the dinghies he sailed as a youth to the bigger boats he drew as an adult, Burnham said. Farr, though, bristles at this widely held assessment, calling it a gross oversimplification spread by the yachting press, which he generally holds in low regard and occasionally assails in stinging letters and phone calls.

When he wasn't fighting the press, Farr battled the sailing committees. He still contemptuously refers to the international rulesmakers as politicians rather than sailors. This was no gentlemen's disagreement. This was war.

Eventually, as with almost everything else, Farr prevailed.

"Good won over evil," said Farr, who still seethes at the memory.

Thoroughly rebuked, the rules committees eventually invited him to join them during a major revision to yachting guidelines in the mid-1990s. Yet even as he took a greater role in international yacht racing's governing bodies -- drawing criticism that he gained an unfair advantage by helping write the rules he plays by -- Farr still considered himself an outsider.

There is a popular saying about Farr in sailing circles, though few will utter it to his face: "Bruce Farr keeps his head straight because he has chips on both shoulders."

Trying Something New
Farr's firm has drawn 498 distinct designs, and he estimates that 10,000 boats built to his specifications are on the water today. The fastest, the ones that race in the rarefied environs of the Volvo and the America's Cup, are Spartan creations conceived with the sole goal of speed. They bear no resemblance to the water-bound palaces for the wealthy that the name "yacht" implies. Farr's speed machines have no showers. Crew members sleep strapped to bunks so they won't be thrown to the floor by rogue waves, and only a thin layer of fiberglass keeps out the wind.

What sets Farr apart from his competitors, sailing experts say, are his brazen innovations. In the mid-1980s, it was his "Plastic Fantastic" design, a fiberglass concoction that scandalized the 12-meter yachting class, which had long been the domain of aluminum boats. America's most famous sailor, Dennis Conner, set the sailing world abuzz by asking, "Why would you want to build a plastic boat if you didn't want to cheat?"

The slur sparked a furious controversy and led to a one-on-one America's Cup challenge match in 1988 between the swaggering Conner and Farr's New Zealand mates. Conner humiliated the Kiwis with his own bold move, sailing a catamaran that easily spanked the Farr-designed single-hull entry. Lawsuits and finger-pointing ensued, but the victory stood.

More America's Cup disappointments followed.

In the early 1990s, Farr audaciously designed a boat for the noted skipper Michael Fay with a long pole extending from the front, called a bowsprit, making it look a bit like a floating unicorn. But the innovation was ruled illegal.

Farr also sparred with the world's best-known sailor, Sir Peter Blake. Farr claimed that the iconic Blake misled him into thinking he would design a New Zealand America's Cup entry for 1995, then hired other designers when it was too late for Farr to align with another team. The dust-up was documented in excruciating detail in a biography that Farr keeps in the waiting room of his Annapolis office.

But Farr's most spectacular America's Cup disaster came in 1999, when Marshall's Farr-designed Young America entry broke in half and almost sank during a trial race, crumpling the top-rated team's hopes of victory. Farr blamed the crackup on a faulty deck repair that he had nothing to do with; others speculated about a design flaw. Marshall says we may never know what happened.

Undaunted, Farr has now teamed up with Ellison, one of the world's richest men, for the 2003 America's Cup. A team of 40 designers and consultants, including 11 designers from Farr's firm, is working on the project as the sailing world waits and watches.

"Farr needs to win the America's Cup to have the complete package," said ESPN sailing analyst Gary Jobson,the tactician on Ted Turner's 1977 America's Cup winner, Courageous.

Yet Farr plays down the importance of the America's Cup bid to his legacy. "We're considered number one, rightly or wrongly," he said, "and we've done that without the America's Cup."

Those who know Farr, however, have a hard time imagining anything but a compulsively focused run at the America's Cup. They have seen Farr's competitive zeal in the Volvo, in big European races and even in less-intense sprints around the Chesapeake Bay.

Collins remembers a windy afternoon race in the Chesapeake a few years back when he spotted a speedboat dashing up behind his yacht. A man was on the bow, waving his arms and signaling.

"We were all trying to figure out, who is that guy?" Collins said.

As the boat drew near, Collins realized it was Farr. The designer was in a lather because he thought Collins's crew was mishandling the sails. They made the adjustment Farr was demanding. And the boat started to go faster.