William McBride
Youtube Playlists
Youtube Playlists
William McBride
March 29-April 6 Slide Deck
March 29-April 6 Slide Deck

Janov Racing

March 13 49er Debrief

Boat Handling

The playlist of videos from the weekend can be found above. Gybes were interesting because you’re losing so much apparent wind through the turn that you come out without enough pressure to both hit at the same time. Need to either be patient, or else let the boat load and then hit hard to provide a kinetic move to get the boat back up to speed right away. In some of the gybes, you would surf down a wave in the entry and in these it was important to realize that pressure was about to go away, and would stop supporting Jordan’s weight. Gybes got much cleaner once you guys started accounting for this organic wave piece.

Tacks looked very good. When you fall over in this stuff, the key is to stay collected (tight core) and keep moving through the boat. This part improved quite a bit. The faster you are through the boat, the more you can come out with main tighter on your final angle.

In the downspeed boat handling, we discussed several types of double tacks - in particular, the aggressive snap versus the slow roll. The scenario drill that we did was working on a “triple tack” to get the leeward boat stalled with the initial double tack, and then tack away to open up a 2 boat length hole. We will continue working on this.

Speed

As far as the speed work, one thing you guys played with on this day was board up. I’d be curious to see notes on Racing Alpha about how the board up felt different than winding on the rig. Is it better when you have to drive more?

I would also love to see notes on the asymmetries in technique from tack to tack and/or gybe to gybe.

February 27 49er Debrief

Click the image above to review 360 Videos from the day.

The focus on this day was on straight line boat speed. We experimented with various camera angles and reference marks on the main to be able to accurately quantify sail shapes. The first question that we want to answer is: What cap shroud tension maximizes depth in the main at various wind speeds.

Matching Conditions With Technique

This was a main focus on the water, and will continue to be one of our main discussions throughout the “year of speed”. The idea here is that we need to be able to adjust for and articulate changes in technique due to sea state and varying conditions. Often this means modifying the ratio of steering to sail trim and weight movement.

The question that helps to start this discussion is: How is port different than starboard today?

On this day specifically, you felt is was easier to pinch on port, which potentially meant that more steering on port and less mainsheet ease in the puffs was a good idea. The challenge in this case though was that you often crashed at the top, so being quick to ease main again in the bear away was important.

One thing that we focused on was ensuring that in the “press” moments (where we want the bow to come back down"), the main eased in conjunction with the steering. Often steering was leading main ease here, causing the boat to load up, and then Grant would over compensate with main ease. It’s kind of a trust exercise where “press” needs to lead to both people trusting that the other person is going to do their job right away, and not waiting to feel it.

Listen to the comms in the 360 video and see if we can optimize communications to improve this.