The manufactures would probably be reluctant to take the risk…A manufacturer can brag all they want about how well their boat is constructed and use their marketing machine to sell the product. But…when you put your reputation on the line in a race like the 1000 in head to head with your competitor’s, two nasty things can happen. 1) You can have the strongest boat out there and get picked off in big shore break by a freak set, or human error. The only thing most people will hear is of the winner…and will assume that it must be the strongest/fastest boat. Yours may be stronger, lighter, have a racing life of three times that of your competition, but if you don’t finish the race because of breakdown, you will be fighting an up hill battle trying to sell your boat on the feature of superior construction.
2) If you are a manufacturer and know your boat is not up to the challenge, the last thing you want is to see pictures of your boat breaking up on National TV/Magazines/Internet Sites, while your competition goes merrily along.
By keeping it one design recently, they have avoided many of these embarrassments. If all boats are of the same size, make and model, when one breaks up it is attributed to the rough conditions, not always the boat itself. A quarter of the fleet could go down and the chosen boat would still take on the mystique of having been a Worrell's 1000 boat.
It would seem that there is just not enough incentive for a manufacture to take that high a risk for so small a potential profit.
It would be nice to see the race open up and breath a little more, open it up to any catamaran 20 feet and under, no beam limit, no sail limit…Let the Atlantic be the rule maker… this could (once again) be the developmental proving ground for new ideas and innovation.
Have TV crews follow the teams in a kind of Eco-challenge format...with all the adventure/reality showes on TV lately it would probably draw a huge audience. By the end of the week catamaran sales could go up 10 fold...I can't believe no one thought of this before????? Now that could get the manufactures attention!
Bob
