Farr Yacht Design dominates major sailing races the way the Yankees grip baseball championships: virtually totally. Stephen A. Morris, the firm?s vice president, recently discussed its winning streak in the Whitbread/Volvo Ocean Race, sailing economics and how Farr Yacht plans to conquer the America?s Cup with Larry Ellison.
How many of the Volvo Ocean Race boats in the last race were your designs?
In the last race, there were eight boats sailing around the world — and we designed six. It was a pretty big event for us. This is something that?s been a popular part of our work for a number of years. One of our boats has won [that] race for the past five races, since 1985. In the previous race, there were eight boats — of which seven were ours.
Have you already begun work on the boats for the next race four years from now?
Yeah. There?s still a lot of discussion going on about what the next race is going to be. Volvo has taken over this race from Whitbread. The 2001 race was purely Volvo. Now, they want to take it to the next level. They certainly want to get more boats in the race. We are having discussions with them about various ways to achieve getting more entrants on the start line.
I imagine price must be the limiting factor. How much does the “base” Farr design cost?
To get a whole boat constructed? They end up costing probably around two to two and a half million dollars. We only do the design part of that job. We produce a set of drawings for the clients, and the clients go away and get the boat built.
That?s only one part of the whole campaign cost. There are other things — like buying sails for the boat and employing crew and support teams, the logistics of going around the world to all these different ports with your support staff. It ends up costing a lot of these campaigns somewhere between $10 and $15 million to put together the whole race, and some people have even spent more than that.
Does all of your designing take place in Annapolis?
Yes.
How high-tech is that process?
It varies. Most of our stuff gets done on PCs these days. They are pretty high-end, obviously. We do quite a bit of computational fluid-dynamic analysis, to calculate the flow around the hull and the keel and stuff like that. We contract out some of that work to consultants outside. They use SGI [Silicon Graphics] machines. But most of our in-house stuff is done on PCs.
Everything is computer-designed. Bruce Farr has been designing boats on computers for, I?d say, 15 years now. We use particular computer-aided design (CAD) programs that are designed for doing hull design and other sorts of naval architectural things. We also use a very sophisticated CAD program called Pro Engineer. That allows us to do really neat stuff, like put together a model for a keel and then say we want the bulb on the end to weigh 7,000 kilograms and we want the keel to have two square meters of area.
The program then goes and figures out what the dimensions are that achieve those goals of ours.
How many employees do you have?
We have 15 here. This is us. This is the only office.
You list the Princess of Spain as a client. How much does a Farr design cost? It must be a lot.
I wouldn?t say so, relative to the industry. It depends on how big the boat is. It?s sort of like asking what the price of a car is.
Is there a range?
It?s hard to say. It depends.
Could it go into the millions of dollars?
No. Up into the hundreds of thousands maybe. And as low as $10,000 or something for a small boat.
You don?t just design hard-core racing boats. You do mass production models for companies like Beneteau.
Yes, and Beneteau and Carol Marine, they are really the mainstay of our company. They produce so many boats. The income that we gain from that allows us the financial security to go and dabble in these more esoteric ends of the sport.
The cycle is completed when your average guy on the street sees our race record and says, “wow, I?d like to have a piece of that,” and goes and buys a Beneteau. For us, the design philosophy is to make sure that the people who are buying the smaller boats are still buying very good-quality designs that sail well and perform as well as they can.
Can you give me an idea of Farr?s economic size? How much revenue do you generate?
We?re a privately held company, so we keep that private.
Farr has been designing boats in Annapolis since 1981. Is there any estimate of the number of your boats that are in the water?
Each design we do gets a unique number. We are currently up to design number 530. But the number of actual boats would be a lot more than that, since you have so many of these production boats, where they built two or three hundred boats. Somebody has estimated somewhere between five and ten thousand boats out there. It?s hard to really judge.
Do you have any idea of Farr?s economic impact on the area? I imagine a part of the reason the Whitbread/Volvo has stopped here for the past two races is that these boats were sort of coming home to where they were born.
We?d like to think so, but I?m not sure we?re that important actually. I think the race coming here was more based on economics for the sponsors rather than the fact that we were here.
Apart from the employment of people, we also use research and testing facilities around here. We do tank testing at a U.S. Naval facility in Carderock on the other side of Maryland. This afternoon, actually, I?m off to the wind tunnel at the University of Maryland, where we do keel testing and stuff like that.
There is a contribution to the region because we are here. A lot of the research money that we get for these designs from things like Volvo and America?s Cup tends to get spent around here.
Are you working on the America?s Cup this afternoon?
Yes.
That?s been a tougher nut to crack. You haven?t won that one yet.
No. The America?s Cup is a curious thing; it goes on and on. But our role tends to be smaller. The team is so much bigger. A lot of these campaigns end up employing 100, 150 people along the way. Hopefully, we?re going to do it this time though.
You?re working with billionaire Oracle founder Larry Ellison?s bid right?
Yes. [The race] starts in October in New Zealand.
It?s been estimated that he is dropping between $10 million and $20 million on his attempt to win the cup.
I think it?s probably a bit more than that.
Sailing itself is big business, but do you have an idea of what it is that attracts business titans to sailing?
I think there?s probably a grand sense of adventure. Sailing has always been a romantic thing for people to get involved in. The business of yacht racing is highly competitive, and a lot of these guys also are very competitive. It?s a little like corporate life. You put the team together and go out and win something.
