Sail on

Olympic sailor Andrew Simpson is now the co-owner of a composites company – and is using his expertise to design and build better boats. Lou Reade reports.
Andrew Simpson, who competed for Team GB as a sailor at London 2012, won silver in the Star class. He may be the only competitor from the games who is also the co-owner of a composites company.

Not long after finishing work on the boat for the Olympics, he and boat builder Alex Newton decided to set up their company, AC Marine & Composites.

“The process of building the boat was so fluid, we thought we should try doing other projects – whether it was race and sailing boats or other composites components,” says Simpson.

Their company, based in Lymington in Hampshire, employs 13 people and has already begun to branch out beyond marine parts.

Simpson has certainly had a busy 12 months. Late last year he put the finishing touches on the new Star class boat, in time for London 2012; just before Christmas, he and Newton set up their company. At the Olympics, he competed in the Star class event with Iain Percy, winning silver. To cap it all, he recently became a father for the second time.

There are 10 classes of boat in the Olympics. Star class – in which Simpson competed – is the heaviest of all. As with Formula One cars, there are rules governing the specification of each craft.

“The overall design concept is more than 100 years old, but there’s a tolerance within the rules,” says Simpson. “It’s around 8mm differential on each station.”

Each ‘station’ is a measurement data point. There are 10 on the hull of a boat, and these determine factors such as depth and width. The 8mm tolerance allows designers to adapt the hull’s shape and centre of gravity, so that the boat will perform well under certain conditions.

“When you are 3mm out, you can tell,” says Simpson. “That’s why Alex ensures everything is to within 0.5mm.”
Despite the prevalence of composites in these boats, carbon fibre is not allowed – which meant that S-glass had to be used in order to stay within the rules.

Simpson adds that the boats are made in quite a standard fashion: “They are made of prepreg glass and after resin infusion, it is vacuum bagged,” he explains. “It needs to be quite simple.”

Nature versus nurture

There is a current debate about how some Olympic sports – such as cycling – are as much about the technology as they are about the competitor. This case can also be made in sailing, as there needs to be a very experienced team behind the building of any boat.

“Every other competitor is trying to win, and is doing the same thing,” says Simpson. “It’s a hard process to get that concept of building, learning from mistakes, and going again. Every other team was working with sail and boat designers to find their edge. You just have to do a better job.”

Simpson’s latest boat was designed by yacht designer Juan Kouyoumdjian, who has built boats for both the Americas Cup and Volvo Ocean Race. Part of his expertise is in using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modelling to determine the best hull shape. “He has developed the best CFD tools there are,” says Simpson.

The team also included John Levell, a structural engineer who had previously worked on composites at NASA. “In short, the designer comes up with the boat’s shape and the structural engineer tries to make it better and lighter,” Simpson notes.

He adds that it’s a constant battle to distribute the weight around the hull in order to optimise the boat for sailing conditions. This is done in order to control the pitch of the boat – that is, how it leans in the water as it is moving. If this can be minimised, the boat will travel faster. “In that sense, CFD was very important,” he says.

CFD helps to determine where the centre of gravity should be, but Simpson says it is only a tool that helps to find the best solution: it must be interpreted, as it will not give a single ‘right’ answer. “CFD is telling you the direction to take, but it’s for you to judge how far to go,” he says.

And ultimately, the laboratory results must then be tested on the water – which is where Simpson is in his element.

“This ‘live’ testing is always better than the theoretical testing,” he avows. “This is the ‘flight testing’ phase – and it takes the longest time. If you can get an improvement of just one-tenth of a per cent, in a few areas, you’ll be very happy.”

In the same vein, he is adamant that boats on their own do not win races, as it is up to the competitor to do the actual sailing.

“If you make a bad decision during a race, that’s when the opposition can take a chip out of you,” he says. “It makes you more determined to get it right.”

Can’t win them all

Simpson’s London 2012 adventure was ultimately a frustrating one: he and Percy ended up with a silver medal, when they were the reigning Olympic champions from Beijing 2008. To make things worse, the boat that they spent so long designing and building ended up not being used in the race. They decided that it would not have been suited to the likely race conditions.

“In the end, it would have been perfect – but you have to make those choices,” he says. And, to add insult to injury, the Star class has been dropped from the next Olympics – though there are moves to have it reinstated.
Whatever the fate of the Star class at the next games, his new company has already begun to move beyond the marine focus that is his passion.

“We’ve started making furniture, and there’s also lots of demand from renewable energy companies,” he says. He adds that the location in Lymington is ideal, as there is a good local supply of skilled composites workers. And while the company is already making 30m long parts, he has his sights set higher.

“To get to the level of what we’re planning, we’ll need to move to bigger premises,” he concludes. “With all the demand, we’re hoping this will happen in the next 18 months.”

www.acmarineandcomposites.com