Team Origin's TP52 program taking shape

[Source: Team Origin] TEAMORIGIN decided to build a new TP52 for the 2010 season and engaged with Juan Kouyoumdjian and his design team as the Principal Designer of the boat. Juan and his team have worked closely with the TEAMORIGIN sailing team in developing the new boat and the process they followed has reflected closely that of an AC design process for the purposes of training and testing. The boat is currently being built at Salthouse Boatbuilders in Auckland, New Zealand, and the team is very pleased with the progress to date. The boat will be shipped to Europe in March ready for the first TP52 Audi Med Cup event in May 2010.

Juan K added his thoughts on this TP52 project, “It has been a hectic and tight programme – the decision to build a new boat was made early on by the team but we had to wait for the TP52 Class to finalise some rule changes and therefore that made it quite a pressurised situation. We were able to start work on some areas ahead of schedule based on some ‘intelligent assumptions’ but only finalized the design details after we had the class rules in full.

He went on to add, “It is a new class for us to design and therefore we were playing the game of catching up and understanding as well as coming up with our own set of solutions, a process of discovery and response, which has presented its challenges but has been a really enlightening process too. We worked incredibly closely with the sailing team and we are all very much looking forward to seeing the end result of the new boat. In summary I think we all feel we have a lot to gain and little to lose in this process.”

The sailing team announced so far for the TEAMORIGIN TP52 sees many familiar squad names and promises to be an exciting team – Ben Ainslie, Iain Percy, Ian Moore, Andrew Simpson, Mike Sanderson, Tony Mutter, Christian Kamp, Chris Brittle, Julien Cressant and Matt Cornwell.