Friday, April 11, 2008

Franck Cammas comments on BMW Oracle

Franck Cammas, the famous French multihull specialist, has published an interesting video where he and his teammate Bruno Laurent comment on the first training sessions they had last week together with BMW Oracle. The American team ended today two weeks of training aboard Cammas' Groupama 2 trimaran in view of the forthcoming 33rd America's Cup match that will presumably take place with such boats.

The video being in French we provide here below its transcript in English, with the corresponding time on the video. The message both French sailors convey is that BMW Oracle's sailors are highly professional, the team is extremely well organized and no efforts are spared in pursuit of mastering the multihull yachts.


Video copyright Franck Cammas / Groupama

Franck Cammas (Time frame 00:17 to 00:53): They arrived with a very open mind and we also must have an open mind because we can learn a lot from them, mainly in the organization, the studies they carry out during each sailing session, the debriefs they have, the way they monitor performance, how they measure performance (they are really impressive in that aspect). We can receive lots of numbers and analysis and we have to be able to process them. It's true these are things we are not used to doing in such a scientific way, analyzing each sailing session.

Bruno Laurent (Time frame 01:01 to 01:15): First of all, we have 9 cameras for the sails. We have a complete electronics system, in double, in order to check whether it's better performing than ours. We are stuffed with electronics.

Franck Cammas (Time frame 01:20 to 01:43): They are used to discovering boats, because even in monohulls they spend a lot of time on different boats. It's true these are very enthusiastic boats and they have a smile on their face while sailing and this is nice. They want to learn and they are learning well. It's true you move differently on this type of boats and there's no reason why they wouldn't be able to do it. They feel comfortable on this boat very quickly.

Bruno Laurent (Time frame 01:54 to 02:20): As far as maneuvers are concerned, I think that after 2 days they are doing almost as well as we normally do. On the other hand, at least for now, we have to constantly manage them. We are only 3 aboard, Franck, Thierry and myself. We have to think in English, talk to them in English and on top of that they ask questions when we are maneuvering. Sometimes it can get really confusing but generally speaking everything is going fine.

Franck Cammas (Time frame 02:23 to 02:47): Yes, we are progressing well. Today we changed a large part of the crew because there's a lot of people that will have to come aboard and discover the boat. Well, we didn't continue yesterday's progress but we certainly had lots of luck between yesterday and today as far as wind conditions are concerned. Even during the day we managed to progress and they are very powerful people, physically prepared, very concentrated on what they are doing and as a result they are learning fast.

Bruno Laurent (Time frame 03:04 to 03:33): In fact are we surprised when a stonemason builds a nice wall of perpend stone? Of course not. It's their job after all. They do that all year round. They only do that. They don't even have to prepare the boat. It's a completely different world for us. We have to prepare the boat, do our physical training and sail while they only have to train and sail. It's normal that they do their job.

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1 Comments:

At 6:50 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Thank you for providing the translation

 

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