Big Pimpin’
Anyone who has ever wondered how to sail a boat faster will be interested in KND- SailingPerformance’s input. The company gathers sailing engineers who met in Valencia during the 32nd America’s Cup and decided to join forces. As the name suggests the company is specialized in sailing performance and optimization of racing yachts. KND’s vision is to combine expertise from the drawing board (CFD & VPP) to the analysis of sailing data, using its proprietary suite of software. Such a combination of talents isn’t usually available outside Cup projects!
Practically their expertise helps avoiding pitfalls at the design stage by cross checking VPP results with their real life experience. Once sailing it helps going beyond the mere numbers and identifying changes that will make the boat faster.
This vision has already been embraced by numerous teams and designers. On the design side, Shaun Carkeek, Tom Humphreys (Vaquita), Javier Jaudenes (Win Win, J One), Mills Design (Alegre3), Bernard Nivelt (A13), Reichel Pugh (Magic Carpet3) and Guillaume Verdier (Safran) have used KND’s CFD and VPP services. On the race course KND’s presence made itself felt in just about every major regatta for the last two years. Offshore, Groupama and Camper in the last Volvo, Macif in the last Vendée Globe, Wild Oats XI during the Sydney Hobart have been using KND’s performance analysis software tools and services. Inshore, Quantum Racing (since 2011) and Ran4 have dominated the 2013 TP52 season while the mini maxis Ran2, Alegre3, Shockwave, BellaMente and Caol Ila R sweeped pretty much all the 2013 available silverware, all of them using KND’s tools and services!
Today, KND believes that it is time for its tools to be available for a broader audience for which a specific version has been developed. All sailors can improve from using KND’s tools: go straight to their web page and download a trial version of their software. You too can start playing with your calibration, polars, crossovers and targets. Alternatively get KND to do the work for you. With their new ‘season analysis service pack’, send them all your sailing data and you will receive optimized targets 3 times a year. Contact them!
Title inspiration thanks to Dexter Morgan.
