Rainbow’s first Palma training sessions are a reminder of the joys of J Class racing

Under the new ownership of Admiral’s Cup winner Peter Harrison, Rainbow has started the work up to June’s Superyacht Cup Palma Richard Mille with a fantastic three-day training session on the Bay of Palma. The boat was last raced in September 2024 at the J Class Barcelona Regatta during the last America’s Cup but has been brought back into full race trim as the new crew prepare for their first encounter with the class’s dominant force, the Swedish flagged Svea.

David ‘Freddie’ Carr has two decades of America’s Cup experience under his belt, most recently as a grinder and cyclor on the AC75s, but he races everything from Etchells to Maxis, most notably a firm fixture on Harrison’s Jolt Sailing Team and Tony Langley’s TP52 Gladiator. He, among others, is bristling with excitement at the chance to be back racing on a J Class yacht again.

The last few days have been the team’s first experience of Rainbow and Carr is loving life as runner trimmer at the back of the boat. He has been extolling the pleasure and virtues of J Class sailing on The Foil

After three days of training he enthuses, “We definitely a have a young vibe on board. And we have a lot of people who had never sailed a J Class although they have done lots of big boats. Take someone like Joey Newton, for example, would be a great example, he’s done decades of IACC classes and the whole of foiling world and everything like that. And here we are in Palma, Joey stepped off the J Class sailing in 20 knots and says ‘that's probably one of the most fun days sailing I've ever had in my life’ And I think that's the kind of message we're trying to push is that while everyone seems to be talking about doing 55 knots everywhere. But the fact of the matter is that the other side of Grand Prix racing away from the foiling stuff is in such rude health.”

He is loving the demanding intensity and awesome power of the J Class which requires polished skills which some maybe felt they had left behind, but the pursuit of pure perfection has been revived,

“What I think Joey, myself and others love is that sailing the J Class  completely reopens a set of skills that you've probably left pushed to one side, some for the best part of 15 years. Back when we were all sailing IACC class boats, you would do six days a week, six hours a day of absolutely perfecting  spinnaker pole, overlapping headsail, big loads on winches world. That’s the world that we all grew up with. And we all absolutely loved to try and become world class at. And with the development of modern sailing with A Sails and then moving on into foiling, it's something that we've all reluctantly left behind.

“It takes your breath away…..”

Freddie recalls some of the highlights of the last days on the Bay of Palma,
“So when we get back on boat and we did a (spinnaker) set two days ago in 20 knots and the boom eased out with that massive noise and the runner got bumped down and the pole got snapped back and you stand there and you look at the amount of sail area in front of you and it takes your breath away. And you don't get that sensation on any other class of boat, not even a mini maxi, not even a cup foiling boat. You're just in awe of this thing that I don't understand how a boat that weighs 160 tonne floats. It's just like, ‘What is this?’ And you go from upstairs where everything's rattling away and there's massive burps on the runner winch that shake the whole boat . And you'll nip downstairs - you don't pee off the side of a J class obviously - so you nip downstairs to go for a wee and you go into this absolute world of luxury and tranquilly……which I always find quite funny.

Shared responsibility
Carr explains, “And so I think that's it. I think we've all, over 15 years or sort of 2007, so 19 years since we all stepped away from this spinnaker pole overlapping heads all world, the majority of us have not touched that box of skills again. And it is refreshing how natural it is. You have to sail in a way whereby you are responsible. With what you're doing you're responsible for other people around you because the loads are that high. And if you're not perfectly in sync with the people around you, someone's going to get hurt.”

Great communication is essential
“You’re in a world of having really good crew bosses that run the programme. So we have George Skuodas is our bow boss, and he's fantastic. He's obviously been with Valsheda forever. And then we have Mo Gray, who is the link between Ed Baird, who's our tactician, and the rest of the crew. And what they say is gospel. They're very formulaic. They take it incredibly seriously because a bad call by them isn't just haemorrhaging boat lengths, but it's putting people's livelihoods and lives at risk. With the equipment flying around up there, it's a big deal.”

He continues, “And that definitely stood out to a few people, like a few crew of the crewmen that we have, Bradley McLaughlin, for example, you'd call him a young professional sailor because he's 30, but it just, it blew his mind what sailing that boat looked and felt like compared to anything else he's ever done. And you just, you look down the rail and everyone's grinning from ear to ear.”

Rainbow will have Rodney Adern trimming the mainsail, Joey Newton and Lorenzo Mazza trimming. Freddie Carr is doing the runners at the back. Micky Müller is up in the bow with Bradley McLaughlin. Peter Harrison, the owner, drives.

Freddie confirms, “It's amazing. And Peter drives the whole time and him coming from a world where he's come out of 52s and mini maxis. Peter just is like, ‘I cannot believe a how hard work it is like physically moving the wheel and locking the boat in’

He continues, “Watching him try and land a tack where it is like 13 turns one way. And then when the bow gets close to tacking angle has to spin it four turns back the other way to slow the turn, it’s busy. And in the pre-starts we are pre-start, I'd say it's very similar to a TP52 pre-start, like the amount of circling we do before we do the final wind up on port and tack.”

Their training has focused on maneuvers, speed testing will come when they get a chance to line up with Svea,

“It sounds crazy but we were kind of doing dinghy stuff, which was refreshing, like getting up to speed, tacking, getting up to speed, tacking, like really, even though the boat’s a 2012 boat the concept of the boat is close to a hundred years old."

Carr explains a little of how different Rainbow is to the other J's that he’s sailed on, Velsheda and Ranger.  

“I understand it's the lightest in the fleet by maybe 20 tonnes. I think it sits around 160 where the others sit at 180 and I've sailed on Valsheda and on Ranger. On all the boats that I've sailed on previously we have been power compromised with the hydraulic winch system, whereas winding up around a leeward mark on Rainbow, Rodney, myself, and Joey, who are all going on the runners, the main sheet and the overlapping heads are all winding up close to max load in second gear on the winches. And it's kind of spitting rope at you and you have to throttle down to stop yourself over sheeting targets.  So the efficiency is clear, I haven't sailed a J class since 2022. And obviously Rainbow’s got this hydraulic package and the engineering work that has gone into the hydraulic winch system on this boat is second to none on any boat that I've been on of this size."

And he believes neither boat should have any rating advantage, first across the line, he thinks, should win….
“In terms of performance from everything I've seen on the ORC rating, I think this is one of the things where the J kind of stands a little bit with the, let's say the TP52 is when they're raced under ORC they are close enough that the majority of the time, the first boat across the line wins and deserves that win. And I believe that'll be the case between us and Svea this year. But of course it is not lost on us that those Svea guys have been setting the standard pretty high for the last five or six years in the J's. So it's going to be a challenge to get to where they are. And if we take a couple of wins off them, we'd be over the moon, but they've definitely set the bar in the class for the recent J sailing. We all hope it will be close and we can do the boat justice.”