This article was first published in the January 2016 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
When Hannah White heads out in her boat to train on Cambridgeshire's Grafham Water, she takes her life in her hands. Speedbird, the craft in which she hopes to become the fastest female sailor over one nautical mile in March 2016, can travel at over 75kph. "If you move the tiller more than a millimetre, you can spin out of control," says the 32-year-old (pictured). Falling overboard at that velocity is like hitting concrete.
A high-performance monohull, Speedbird raises itself out of the water on two T-shaped hydrofoils, reducing the area in contact with the water's surface. To optimise these supporting vanes, White and designer Dave Chisholm teamed up with Land Rover to tweak the design using CAD software and use a computational fluid dynamics simulation to assess the changes.
New prototypes can be created overnight in carbon by a computer numerically controlled milling machine. "The current holder of the overall men's record took ten years," says White. "We were sailing our boat within 12 weeks of coming up with the idea."
White has already set a new record in her training boat (a commercially available vessel called a Moth) for crossing the Channel. She hopes such feats encourage those who lack a science background, as she does, to discover more about physics and also to inspire women to enter high-performance sailing. "Take [the 2015] Moth World Championships. There were probably 120 sailors -- I think three were girls."
Her attempt coincides with other speed record attempts, including Bloodhound SSC [WIRED 12.14] and an AeroVelo bicycle [WIRED 02.15]. How does she explain this sudden trend? "Speed is very easy to understand -- it spans such a range of disciplines and budgets," she says. "But it's ultimately about the same thing: A to B as quickly as you can."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
