#we need a ship name for Vortex and Bee

[bibluebutterfly]

I am collecting them like Pokémon cards💪😤.

EDIT: Nothing. Just Face Nuzzles (🥰)

[riversofmars]

I have a prompt. Thirteen's vain attempt to get that fez to Eleven because she runs into River+Amy.. who are like NOPE no way.

Ohh I love this so much, that was a lot of fun! I really hope you like this, just a bit of fun! <3

Rating: G

Word Count: 1300

Read on AO3 or below

Delayed Delivery

“I don't know about you but I’m glad that’s over.“ Yaz sighed once they had returned to the TARDIS. Their excursion to Kablam! had been quite something.

“Same,“ Ryan agreed and Graham nodded as well:

“Me too.“

“Not quite over yet.“ The Doctor grinned when she spotted the fez she had ordered, still sitting on top of the TARDIS console. “The fez!“ She skipped over to it and sat it on top of her head with incredible joy.

“Yeah I did wonder about that, why a fez?“ Yaz asked, as its origin remained a mystery.

“I ordered it,“ the Doctor declared, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.

“You ordered a fez?“ Graham repeated, trying to figure out what in the world could have possibly possessed her to do so.

“Why?“ Ryan asked bewildered.

“Why does anyone order a fez? Because fezes are cool.“ The Doctor grinned and put her hands on her hips, holding her head - and the fez - high with pride.

“They’re really not…“ Yaz shook her head slowly, wondering how she could possibly have come to that conclusion.

“Only, this one arrived too late.“ The Doctor paid no heed to her comment, instead she went looking for the box and the shipping receipt to make sure her memory was correct. “Ah yes, see, I ordered it like… two lifetimes ago?“ She shrugged and looked back to her friends. “The wedding night of my best friends. Had little else to do, just sitting around the TARDIS while they were busy.“ She gestured quotation marks in the air and grimaced. “I should probably drop it off with my past self, that would have made me so happy.“ She placed the box on the console, took the fez off, quite reluctantly too, and placed it back in the box. She almost took it back out again, thinking better of it, but she managed to stop herself and quickly closed the box to resist the temptation.

“If you had… wouldn’t you remember it?“ Yaz frowned.

“Nah, memories blur when I cross my own time stream.“ The Doctor shrugged.

“Aren’t there like… rules against that sort of thing?“ Ryan asked and they all gathered around the console as the Doctor was beginning to set coordinates.

“All we’re doing is dropping off a fez, won’t even need to interact, just got to find a good time where I know where I am and that I won’t run into any trouble… here we go.“ Content with her choice, the Doctor grinned and launched the TARDIS into the time vortex. It only took a moment for them to land again.

“Where are we?“ Graham asked as the Doctor marched to the door, full of purpose, box in hand.

“Moon made of actual honey. Part of the honeymoon tour. Get it honey… moon…?“ She awaited a reaction to her pun but no-one responded. “Never mind,“ she huffed and opened the door. The Fam followed her and as advertised, they found themselves on a yellow moon, surrounded by little else than beeswax and honey. The landscape was magnificent and the vegetation extraordinary. No words appeared adequate to describe the wondrous place.

“Wow…“ All three of them were at a loss for words as they looked around, it certainly appeared a magnificent honeymoon destination. The air was impossible sweet and warm and there was a humming and buzzing in the air originating from the native bee population.

While the Fam were in awe, the Doctor skipped ahead and found the other TARDIS, her TARDIS but much older, just over a ridge.

“There we go…“ she called the Fam who hurried after her. “See, all we need to do is put this box here and…“

“Don’t move,“ a sharp voice interrupted her. “What are you doing over there?“

“Probably setting down a bomb, who are you?“ Another voice added and the Doctor grinned to herself before turning around, she knew both these voices very well indeed.

“River!“ The Doctor turned to look at her wife who - of course - was pointing a gun at her. “Amy!“ Her mother was right next to her, crossing her arms in front of her chest, with an almighty and very Scottish scowl.

“How do you…?“ Amy’s face fell upon hearing both their names and River raised her eyebrows curiously.

“Who are they, Doctor?“ Yaz asked, a little worried at the presence of a gun and the fact that the Doctor didn’t seem bothered about it at all. In fact she was grinning!

“Oh just… my wife and my mother-in-law…“ She answered joyfully.

“What?“ Amy stared at her for a moment, trying to compute the information.

“Doctor?“ River echoed and as the realisation set in, a wide grin spread across her features, mirroring her wife’s expression.

“Oh no…“ Amy groaned.

“Oh yes!“ River smirked as she put her gun away.

“Hang on, you’re married?“ Graham interrupted, flabbergasted, as were Yaz and Ryan.

“Oh most definitely.“ River grinned and was by her wife’s side in an instant, she grabbed her by the collar and kissed her with great enthusiasm. Amy, for her part, just gave an exaggerated sigh, looking anywhere but to her daughter making out with her wife.

“Okay, I sort of expected this to be the other way around…“ Ryan hummed to Yaz and Graham who nodded.

“What are you doing here, Doctor?“ Amy asked, clearing her throat loudly to interrupt them.

“Oh just… wanted to drop something off… for myself… am I around?“ The Doctor gave an awkward grin, trying not to draw too much attention to the box, as she half hid it behind her back.

“Rory fell in the honey lake and the Doctor is defending him against the bees, we were popping back for a change of clothes.“ Amy explained, rolling her eyes at her husband’s clumsiness.

“Oh I remember this!“ Her explanation jogged the Doctor’s memory.

“Do you get your fez at the end of it?“ Yaz asked curiously and the Doctor winced. She had ruined it.

“Don’t tell me…“ Amy sighed, exasperated.

“What’s in the box, Sweetie?“ River asked, trying to snatch the box away but the Doctor pulled away quickly.

“Nothing…“ She retorted, hugging it protectively.

“Doctor?“ Amy crossed her arms in front of her chest and the Doctor found herself cornered by the two women, she bumped into the TARDIS behind her, having nowhere to go.

“Oh come on, please, I’ve had to wait for this for millennia, that’s how long delivery took, let me have this,“ she pleaded.

“Let’s see if it’s any better on you now than it was then,“ River suggested with a playful smirk.

“River?“ Amy shot her daughter a look as if she couldn’t believe she had really just suggested that.

“Come on, just let us see,“ River repeated and a grin spread across the Doctor’s face. She opened the box, pulled the fez out and sat it on top of her head.

“Look, it’s great, it’s red and hey-!“ Before she could even properly showcase the hat, Amy had snatched it off of her head and chucked it into the air. River’s reflexes were sharp as ever as she drew her gun and shot it. The fez exploded mid-air in a laser blast.

“That was incredible,“ Ryan exclaimed and shaking their heads in disbelief, Graham and Yaz had to agree.

“Yeah, well, we have the practice,“ River smirked, holstering her gun and before she pressed a kiss to her wife’s cheek. The Doctor was thoroughly put out as she was left holding the empty box.

“I’m gonna order another one…“ She huffed, somewhat genuinely upset.

“Hey! OI! What’s going on over there?“ A voice carried across the plain. The Doctor, much younger, taller and bow-tied, was waving at them with Rory in tow.

“NOTHING!“ River and Amy called back, laughing, sharing a high five, as the blonde Doctor was left, huffing, and holding her empty box with great disappointment.

[feels--on--wheels]

Knockout Meets June...Again

RID15 AU working title “ContinUnity”. Follows Prime, ignores Rescue Bots, mostly follows RID15 up to the end of Season 2.

Context: Unable to adjust to post-war Cybertron, Wheeljack becomes a bounty hunter bringing in rouge Decepticons.  He adopts a human named Marisol as his Second in Command, makes contact with Bee on Earth, and ends up with Knockout and Sunstreaker as part of his team.  Marisol gets hurt badly because of Sunstreaker's willful disregard of her orders.  They race back to Earth to get her treatment.

"Mari?  Come on, answer me.  Are you with us?" A large claw slipped against the back of a trembling tan hand as the body it was attached to spasmed with pain. "Knocks?  -hurts..." The shining red mech crouched on his knees next to the stretcher, letting her grip the blunt back edge of his talon as she squirmed atop the sheets. "I know sweetheart, but I need you to stay conscious.  Ratchet's getting help.  You're gonna be okay." The squealing of tires in the groundbridge backed up his claim as the older medic's voice started shouting before his wheels had stopped spinning. "Get the equipment out of my cab, carefully!  I need it to-" "-He did this!?  How could you let him in here?" Knockout froze, servos full of supplies, as the new voice cut Ratchet off mid-instruction.  He recognized that quiet, angry voice.  Slag. "June, ignore him, we don't have time!" "Oh, I will make time!  What is that monster doing in this base?  This place is supposed to be safe!" Knockout's engine growled low in irritation.  This was not helping! "You can hate me later!  I-" "Knocks?  What's-ah-what's wrong?  You said- mmmmmm- you weren't hurt.  What's-" Marisol struggled to raise her shoulders off the stretcher, trying to see around Ratchet's bulk.  Knockout scooted back to his place next to her, returning his clawed digit to her searching hand and guiding her back down as the older woman moved around the ambulance after him. "Deep breaths, Mari.  Everything's fine.  This is Nurse Darby, Jack's mother.  She's going to take care of you.  Just keep it together a little longer, Wheeljack's on his way, and you know how he gets." "He didn't...he didn't do anything stupid, did he?" "Just dropping off the 'Cons at Bee's place.  He'll be fine, and you will be too.  I don't know how we'd keep from killing eachother without our little Voice of reason." June stared at the young woman accepting comfort from the disturbingly gentled decepticon medic in the Unit-E hangar.  This was not something she had ever expected to see when she woke up today.  Ratchet transformed and knelt next to his stunned friend. "I didn't think to warn you.  There have been a lot of...changes recently." The nurse's eyebrows nearly hit her hair in response as she gave him a look, but it was enough to get her moving again as she started setting up IV lines and laid out the chemical agents she would need.  For once, Knockout was right.  She could hate him later.  With June back on track with treating their patient, Ratchet moved back to the groundbridge, altering the settings and re-opening the vortex.  Three cars immediately roared through, the yellow lamborghini coming closer to the humans than June was comfortable with.  She was suprised to recognize Bee as the first to transform.  The sleeker yellow one offloaded an orange minibot barely larger than her as a group of people piled out of the white sportscar.  Next came most of Unit-E, and another man in a loud shirt, before Wheeljack transformed and bent next to Knockout as the yellow car she didn't recognize took up a position on the other side of Marisol.  June was taken aback again as the gruff old wrecker delicately stroked one finger over the girl's hair until she opened her eyes. "Hey Mari.  We brought the brats, and Fixit.  Nurse Darby and Ratchet are gonna get you all fixed up.  How're ya doin?" No amount of effort could keep the tension from her body or face, but Marisol seemed determined to try. "Oh, I'm fine.  Gonna be fine.  Knocks keeps sayin' so.  Kid didn't know.  He didn't mean it." "I know babe.  He's okay, 'm not gonna hurt 'im.  Just relax and let the medics do their thing." The roar of another engine drew attention back to the still open groundbridge, and a sleek red car offloaded more passengers before transforming and tugging on the yellow autobot that has so far been silent, alone in the corner.  The similarities between the two were instantly recognizable.  If they were human, June would have said they were brothers.  Red led Yellow away, giving them more room around the bed. "What in the Pit happened out there," Ratchet rumbled, kneeling down himself in the newly vacated space.  Wheeljack frowned at the space above Marisol's head, and Knockout flinched. "She decided to infiltrate a Decepticon's ship with one idiot to free another idiot while Wheeljack went after the last 'Con.  Sunstreaker decided to start a fight instead of going in quiet, which was supposed to be the plan.  I heard the noise from the holding cell before I ever saw her.  Sunny got tossed in the cell with me before 'Jack blew something up outside and drew the guard off.  She got the cell door mostly open, but we didn't know about the minicon.  I didn't even see the little fragger coming up on her.  He tossed her into a pile of junk, did something to her leg when she landed, but she jabbed him with that little tool she and 'Jack came up with and got the door open.  He got ahold of her again before Sunstreaker could get to them, and I don't know what happened, she was just screaming on the floor, with her leg torn open like that and half-cauterized.  All I could think to do was put a pressurizing wrap on it to stop the blood loss, but...there's something broken inside her, and I can't get to it to fix it.  I didn't use any of the scanners that are contraindicated with humans, but...This was the only place I knew of that could help her.  It's been almost...twenty hours." Marisol's good leg scrambled, pushing against the stretcher. "Hands were hot.  Burned." "Little fragger has a Sigma.  Raises the temp in his hands 'til it could melt through armor.  Sunny got a good hit too." "So she has deep cuts, burns, and possibly broken bones?  This is not...Ratchet, get Bill, now.  She's going to need surgery immediately, maybe more than one...I'll have to take her to the hospital.  We're going to need to move her as soon as she's stable, but first I have to see that wound.  She's going to need a cover story."

[ryanmeft]

Where Should Assassin’s Creed go in the Future? Some Ideas.

The Assassin's Creed series has been to some amazing locations and times throughout history, from the Crusades to the American Revolution to the Golden Age of Piracy, but with the announcement of Assassin's Creed: Origins, we're going somewhere far less familiar to modern minds: Egypt at the turn of the millennium. Although spin off titles have gone to Imperial India, The French and Indian War, and Colonial New Orleans, major entries have mostly stuck to recognizable times and places. If Egypt in the 40's BC is a harbinger of things to come, could the team at Ubisoft Montreal be thinking of going more off the beaten path? If so, here are four locations in the past Assassin's Creed could go in the future that might be less familiar in historical lore.

Tudor Conquest of Ireland Sure, it's another Euro-centric location, but considering the Assassins stand for total freedom for all mankind, it's pretty astounding their games haven't yet visited the homeland of the people with perhaps the greatest reputation in the world for picking fights over freedom. The mid-1500's is the perfect time to do it, too. The Tudor Dynasty under Henry VIII was trying to retake control over the autonomous island, the uber-famous Grace O'Malley was in charge of shipping and trade AKA piracy, and there was plenty of juicy inter-clan warfare going on. Given much of modern Irish history was formed during this period, it'd be the perfect setting to drop Assassins and Templars into. Take a page from O'Malley and make the lead a fiery red-headed woman, while using Irish piracy to bring back the high seas action that was so popular in the America-based games. Bonus: Ezio would be dead decades before O'Malley ever went to sea, but who's to say his kids didn't visit Ireland at some point? You could even use those time vortex things to visit other important events for the Irish, like immigration to the New World.

Penal Colony Australia This one is a little off the beaten path for AC. Modern Australia's founding in the late 1700's as a place to dump Britain's excess criminals, from petty thieves to murderers, is one of the most fascinating stories history has to offer. Left on the coast of a new continent with beasts they'd never imagined and a whole new culture of aboriginals, the convicts were barely monitored and essentially formed a new society; after all, where were they going to go? This sense of injustice would be a breeding ground for Assassin ideology, particularly when you factor in the famous outlaws known as Bushrangers. I picture the story beginning on one of the rotting prison ships on the Thames in London, with our hero about to be transported, like the famous song Jim Jones, for a minor crime. The loose nature of the colony could give the locations a Black Flag-esque feel, while the Australian outback would offer different opportunities for gameplay than what is seen in the urban settings of most AC games. With a bit of creative license, the varied wilderness of the outback could make locations for the parkour action; the famous Ayers Rock would be a great tie-in with the series' meta-story. The period also intersected with notable historical figures, with one in particular being an actual governor of the colony: William Bligh. Bonus: The entire reason Britain needed somewhere new to put prisoners is that they had a little trouble in the Colonies, who afterward no longer wished to take Britain's dregs. Given we last saw Connor at the formation of the United States and transportation to Australia began the previous year, it would be neat to work him into the story a bit and discover what became of him.

The Warring States Period China's story stretches far back into pre-history, but China as a unified empire came about after this series of wars between her then-disparate regions between 475-221 BC. The period has a huge number of advantages for an Assassin's Creed game: a ready-made conflict, multiple grinding political axes of opposed leaders, a rich civilization with plenty of cities, and it's far enough in the past that the writers can get a little fancy with the historical accuracy (not that they don't do that already). Since China at this point is not a country so much as a bunch of bees fighting to control a sock, you could have multiple viewpoints on the story ALA the overlooked Suikoden III, where one character sees a certain ruler as a tyrant, but possibly someone who works for that ruler has a completely different perspective. Since the upcoming Origins establishes this period as being nearly two centuries before the formal founding of the Assassins, the story could give us an Assassin-Templar conflict from before the days when they even had names for each other, possibly adding context to Bayek's story. The big advantage, though, is bringing Asia as most think of it into the series proper. China invented paper, gunpowder, fireworks and a whole host of other things and has driven world civilization for eons, but so far it has been relegated to a poorly received 2D spinoff and a couple extended media mentions. If it is true that Ubi's developers have ruled out a Feudal Japanese setting, China seems like the next logical place to go. Bonus: You almost certainly don't remember it, but Revelations establishes that not only did Altair at one point travel to Asia to assassinate a rather major figure, but the short film Embers reveals Assassin's are well established there. How did they first get there, and why are they so cut off from their western brethren that one of them apparently had a lot of trouble getting the famous Ezio's attention? That's a tie-in theme that could be explored.

Heart of Darkness Though the events around the claiming of, and atrocities in, the Congo Free State of 1885-1908 could not drive a game by themselves due to the lack of built up urban areas, this infamous black hole of slavery, degradation, murder and greed, which inspired Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now, would be a perfect setting for the justice minded Assassins to battle the machinations of a Templar-backed King Leopold II. The game could begin in the 1870's, allowing for the inclusion of famous explorer and world class asshole Henry Morton Stanley as a direct antagonist, and follow through the early years of the terrible kingdom he helped create, where slaves had their hands cut off of they failed to produce enough rubber. African Colonialism would be a rough subject, as no major power was free of guilt, but then, that's exactly the kind of morally corrupt and ambiguous situation in which the Assassin-Templar conflict thrives. And although South Africa's Johannesburg wouldn't be a metropolis in time to be worked into the narrative, other cities, particularly in the Islamic regions of Africa, had been thriving for centuries already. Bonus: these events would be taking place shortly after the end of the Civil War in America, which would make another good starting point...and possibly provide a protagonist in the form of a freed slave.  Does anyone have any favorite time periods they’d like me to consider for a second column? Comment away!

[jesusvasser]

Giovanni Soldini, Master of the Sea

Giovanni Soldini turns his weathered face to the Pacific and squints at millions of square miles of cobalt water. What the 51-year-old Italian is pondering is anyone’s guess, but there’s a good chance he’s thinking about the upcoming Transpacific Yacht Race, the storied competition that challenges billionaires, thrill seekers, and bucket-list romantics to traverse 2,225 nautical miles from San Pedro, California’s Point Fermin buoy to the Diamond Head Lighthouse in Honolulu, Hawaii, relying solely on wind power. A legend in the world of long-distance sailing and a national hero in Italy, Soldini looks more like a puckish fisherman compared to the coiffed locals in Southern California’s tony coastal enclave of Marina del Rey. There may be buckets of seafaring adventures swimming in the memory banks behind his hazel eyes, but Soldini gives off a disarming aura of quietude before he gently returns to reality.

The Transpac, as it is commonly referred to, is a 111-year-old race that covers some of the largest, deepest, and most dangerous expanses of water on the planet. This year Soldini will be sailing the Maserati Multi70 trimaran, the first foiling ship of its type to compete in a major open-ocean race. Painstakingly constructed from carbon fiber and titanium, this multimillion-dollar craft was built for the sole purpose of open-water racing. From one-off daggers and cassettes to countless bespoke components, the hardware is dizzying in its specificity, applying Formula 1 levels of engineering to hydrodynamics and weight reduction. In addition to collaborating on the ship’s overall design, Soldini developed flexible solar panels that power the ship’s electronics.

But the Multi70’s X-factor is its ability to “fly,” thanks to a foil that lifts the hull several feet out of the water, thereby dramatically reducing drag and enabling speeds of up to 44 knots—just about 50 mph. The concept is so efficient that the ship can actually exceed the speed of the wind, a party trick that makes for fantastic spectacle at closed-water events like the America’s Cup. But flying ships are unproven on open water, especially along the stretch between California and Hawaii, where a massive vortex of aquatic garbage can threaten the ship’s delicate rudders and foils. Despite a lifetime of sailing experience, the meteorological vagaries of the vast geography and the black art of strategizing a course that capitalizes on the velocity-amplifying power of the wind mean Soldini has his work cut out for him.

Giovanni Soldini became drawn to the ocean in his early teens, but the bond was cemented at 17 when he convinced a 75-year-old American captain to take him sailing across the Atlantic. The route from Palma de Mallorca in the Mediterranean to Antigua in the Caribbean forged an extreme level of adaptability at an age when most kids were getting their kicks playing video games. Soldini didn’t speak English until he picked up the language from the captain. After several months in the Caribbean, he returned home on a Spanish boat, learning Spanish from the crew. “It was fantastic,” he says with a laugh, like a lover reminiscing on the fling that triggered an affair.

“Giovanni’s personality and way of getting his hands dirty and being involved 100 percent reminded John Elkann of the Maserati brothers.”

As his professional sailing career took off, Soldini developed a knack for dominating grueling long-distance ocean races, including the Transat Jacques Vabre (France to Brazil), the San Francisco to Shanghai Tea Clipper Route, the Original Singlehanded Transatlantic Race, and the Transat Québec to Saint-Malo (Canada to France). The relationship with Maserati developed when John Elkann, the Fiat scion who also happens to be the chairman of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, started sailing with Soldini in 2009. Although Soldini originally sought financial support to compete in the Volvo Ocean Race, the relationship with Maserati eventually led to the design and construction of the Multi70 as a way to showcase the brand on a different global stage. The ship also enables would-be Maserati buyers to experience an aspect of the brand’s nonautomotive ventures, acting as a sort of aquatic halo vehicle that could eventually convert sailing experiences into sales.

“By getting to know Giovanni’s personality and passion, somehow [Elkann’s] intuition associated him with Maserati, which a few years ago was still a smaller brand,” says Matteo Sardi, the brand’s North American rep. That plucky marketplace position gave Maserati a unique angle against more household nameplates. “We think of Maserati like a fancy popcorn. It’s not Ferrari. It’s not Lamborghini. Yes, it’s expensive and luxurious, but it’s also made by hand. The people are simpler there. Giovanni’s personality and way of getting his hands dirty and being involved 100 percent reminded [Elkann] a little bit of what he thought about the Maserati brothers.”

Soldini recalls epic oceangoing experiences with the casualness of someone describing a weekend in Napa. “It was a great trip with Maserati,” he says, reminiscing about the adventure when he broke the record from New York to San Francisco along the Gold Route course, a 13,225-mile route that circumnavigates Cape Horn. A previous record stood for 135 years, recorded by the Flying Cloud, a massive clipper ship that completed the journey in 89 days. That achievement was finally beat by a French team that completed the route in 57 days, 3 hours in 2008. Soldini and his crew obliterated that record five years later, finishing in 47 days, 42 minutes.

Then there was the notorious 1998/1999 Around Alone race, a global circumnavigation that requires competitors to sail solo. The leg across the South Pacific from Auckland, New Zealand, to Punta del Este, Uruguay, is particularly daunting because of its massive waves, freezing temperatures, and up to 4,000-mile isolation from landmass. At 59 degrees latitude south, some 2,000 miles west of Chile, friend and competitor Isabelle Autissier capsized. When her 60-foot sailboat flipped upside down in sub-40-degree water (surrounded by even colder ambient temperatures), Autissier donned a thick survival suit and huddled in an air pocket within the hull. Soldini, alerted of the capsizing, diverted his route more than 200 miles for the faint possibility of rescuing his competitor. But with only an emergency radio beacon and a single Comsat-C satellite-tracking signal, the margin of error for locating the distressed ship was approximately seven miles. The odds of contact were even lower because inclement weather visually blended the water into the sky and massive swells offered only fleeting glimpses of the distressed ship.

Then the improbable happened: Soldini spotted the bobbing hull of Autissier’s boat in the distance. He approached and made two passes, screaming her name in hopes of capturing her attention. When no one emerged, Soldini took a third pass and threw a hammer at the hull, triggering her to crawl out of a hatch. Autissier eventually climbed aboard his boat and joined him for 15 days until he reached Uruguay. “She ate all my food,” he jokes, “but it was OK because Isabelle is a very nice person.”

A race spokesman later told The New York Times, “He’s a very determined person. He’s also got one of the best boats in the fleet, and he knows how to sail it quickly to get where he wants to go.” Despite the diversion, Soldini completed the 26,000-mile journey in 116 days, 20 hours, a new world record that beat the previous title by almost five days.

Despite facing the hazards of a life racing on the open sea for three decades, Soldini remains unfazed, seeking ever-greater challenges both on water and on land.

Soldini’s racing recollections tend to follow a distinct format with two oppositional forces at play: the unrelenting rigor of science, logistics, and planning and the sting of nature’s entropy. The former includes his close working relationship with Guillaume Verdier, the renowned nautical designer known for authoring Team New Zealand’s America’s Cup ship. With Soldini’s countless hours at the helm in some of the most extreme oceangoing conditions and Verdier’s engineering problem solving, the two collaborate on the design of crucial components such as the rudders (the Multi70 has three) and the foil, which has a profile that resembles an airplane wing in order to create the lifting force that makes the ship “fly.” Another key collaborator is meteorological guru Pierre Lasnier, with whom Soldini has worked for more than two decades. His prerace ritual includes one or two full days discussing weather possibilities and contingency plans. “Obviously when you’ve [been doing that] for 20 years,” Soldini says, “you speak the same language and you understand. Each time you know a little bit more, [but] it’s not like mathematics. It’s never sure.”

When considering gut instincts versus scientific data, Soldini recalls his second round-the-world race. He had the instinct on the first leg (from Charleston, South Carolina, to Cape Town, South Africa) to stay on a northerly route before heading east because the Caribbean’s trade winds to the south would have slowed his progress. By remaining in the north’s low-pressure zone, he took the lead and felt confident about his route. However, ten days later, a tropical low-pressure system developed and inverted the conditions, completely reversing the standings. “[The competitors] just killed me,” he recalls. “But if I could do it again, I would do it the same because meteorology is not stable. You need to accept that. That’s life. You try, but you are not God.”

Acceptance might be an essential part of Soldini’s constitution, but it also comes from decades of battling some of nature’s mightiest forces. He has tasted the sweetest of victories, but he has also capsized and crashed. Despite some severe personal nadirs, the deepest cut might have been the loss of longtime friend Andrea Romanelli, a yacht designer who was swept into the ocean during a North Atlantic storm. Romanelli’s body was never recovered. The tragedy almost led Soldini to skip the Around Alone race where he rescued Isabelle Autissier.

“It’s like car racing. You have plenty of high and low moments,” he explains, “but one day you will have an accident. You can have 80-, 90-knot winds or 100-foot waves that can sink even a cargo ship. But it’s like anything, I think. The important thing is to have luck and be prepared, to be able to start again.” Not surprisingly, that element of danger doesn’t diminish much on the rare occasion he returns home to Sarzana, a small medieval town in Italy near Pisa. “I love driving cars and motorcycles,” he says, referring to his Alfa Romeo Giulietta and Honda Hornet 600. And, of course, he also keeps several boats on hand—a small multihull catamaran for local journeys, a cruising boat for family and friends, and a small racing boat he’s loaning out for a competition.

Soldini’s three decades of exposure to the world’s oceans have made him a firsthand witness to the realities of a changing planet. Whereas in 1995, during his first around-the-world circumnavigation, he was able to travel at a latitude of 62 degrees south, now he can’t make the journey below 45 degrees due to ice masses that have separated, or calved, from Antarctica. “It’s crazy,” he says. “It’s scary.”

During the 2017 Transpac race, Soldini and his seven-man crew were about 1,500 miles from Los Angeles when the ship struck an unidentified object at night, dislocating one of the rudders. “You cannot believe how many things are floating around this part of the sea,” he says, suspecting the object that was a propane tank. After assessing the extent of the damage, it appeared the carbon housing around the rudder (known as a cassette) disintegrated, and on-the-spot repairs were not possible. Although they were able to recover the rudder, a particularly expensive part, their inability to maintain full stability during the actual race resulted in a 3- to 4-knot speed reduction that led them to cross the finish line in third place.

In the aftermath of the loss, Soldini employs his usual problem-solving resolve. He is already collaborating with Verdier on a cassette design that would work as a fuse, bending along an axis so it can absorb impact without breaking.

When asked about his attraction to ocean racing, Soldini pauses in search of an explanation. “I don’t know,” he says. “What I really love is the fact that the boat is like a world. You never learn enough. You have everything, but you cannot be good at everything.”

In the years since Soldini started sailing, advances in shipbuilding and onboard electronics have changed the game. Now, his transocean ships contain three satellite-linked computers using 16 IP addresses that enable all the trappings of social-media capture required to compete on the global stage. Despite the technology creep, Soldini’s joy of sailing remains.

“It’s just my life,” he says simply. “I adore it.”

The post Giovanni Soldini, Master of the Sea appeared first on Automobile Magazine.

from PerformanceJunk Feed http://ift.tt/2vc0ewk via IFTTT

from Performance Junk WP Feed 4 http://ift.tt/2wLW9Pf via IFTTT

[robertkstone]

Giovanni Soldini, Master of the Sea

Giovanni Soldini turns his weathered face to the Pacific and squints at millions of square miles of cobalt water. What the 51-year-old Italian is pondering is anyone’s guess, but there’s a good chance he’s thinking about the upcoming Transpacific Yacht Race, the storied competition that challenges billionaires, thrill seekers, and bucket-list romantics to traverse 2,225 nautical miles from San Pedro, California’s Point Fermin buoy to the Diamond Head Lighthouse in Honolulu, Hawaii, relying solely on wind power. A legend in the world of long-distance sailing and a national hero in Italy, Soldini looks more like a puckish fisherman compared to the coiffed locals in Southern California’s tony coastal enclave of Marina del Rey. There may be buckets of seafaring adventures swimming in the memory banks behind his hazel eyes, but Soldini gives off a disarming aura of quietude before he gently returns to reality.

The Transpac, as it is commonly referred to, is a 111-year-old race that covers some of the largest, deepest, and most dangerous expanses of water on the planet. This year Soldini will be sailing the Maserati Multi70 trimaran, the first foiling ship of its type to compete in a major open-ocean race. Painstakingly constructed from carbon fiber and titanium, this multimillion-dollar craft was built for the sole purpose of open-water racing. From one-off daggers and cassettes to countless bespoke components, the hardware is dizzying in its specificity, applying Formula 1 levels of engineering to hydrodynamics and weight reduction. In addition to collaborating on the ship’s overall design, Soldini developed flexible solar panels that power the ship’s electronics.

But the Multi70’s X-factor is its ability to “fly,” thanks to a foil that lifts the hull several feet out of the water, thereby dramatically reducing drag and enabling speeds of up to 44 knots—just about 50 mph. The concept is so efficient that the ship can actually exceed the speed of the wind, a party trick that makes for fantastic spectacle at closed-water events like the America’s Cup. But flying ships are unproven on open water, especially along the stretch between California and Hawaii, where a massive vortex of aquatic garbage can threaten the ship’s delicate rudders and foils. Despite a lifetime of sailing experience, the meteorological vagaries of the vast geography and the black art of strategizing a course that capitalizes on the velocity-amplifying power of the wind mean Soldini has his work cut out for him.

Giovanni Soldini became drawn to the ocean in his early teens, but the bond was cemented at 17 when he convinced a 75-year-old American captain to take him sailing across the Atlantic. The route from Palma de Mallorca in the Mediterranean to Antigua in the Caribbean forged an extreme level of adaptability at an age when most kids were getting their kicks playing video games. Soldini didn’t speak English until he picked up the language from the captain. After several months in the Caribbean, he returned home on a Spanish boat, learning Spanish from the crew. “It was fantastic,” he says with a laugh, like a lover reminiscing on the fling that triggered an affair.

“Giovanni’s personality and way of getting his hands dirty and being involved 100 percent reminded John Elkann of the Maserati brothers.”

As his professional sailing career took off, Soldini developed a knack for dominating grueling long-distance ocean races, including the Transat Jacques Vabre (France to Brazil), the San Francisco to Shanghai Tea Clipper Route, the Original Singlehanded Transatlantic Race, and the Transat Québec to Saint-Malo (Canada to France). The relationship with Maserati developed when John Elkann, the Fiat scion who also happens to be the chairman of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, started sailing with Soldini in 2009. Although Soldini originally sought financial support to compete in the Volvo Ocean Race, the relationship with Maserati eventually led to the design and construction of the Multi70 as a way to showcase the brand on a different global stage. The ship also enables would-be Maserati buyers to experience an aspect of the brand’s nonautomotive ventures, acting as a sort of aquatic halo vehicle that could eventually convert sailing experiences into sales.

“By getting to know Giovanni’s personality and passion, somehow [Elkann’s] intuition associated him with Maserati, which a few years ago was still a smaller brand,” says Matteo Sardi, the brand’s North American rep. That plucky marketplace position gave Maserati a unique angle against more household nameplates. “We think of Maserati like a fancy popcorn. It’s not Ferrari. It’s not Lamborghini. Yes, it’s expensive and luxurious, but it’s also made by hand. The people are simpler there. Giovanni’s personality and way of getting his hands dirty and being involved 100 percent reminded [Elkann] a little bit of what he thought about the Maserati brothers.”

Soldini recalls epic oceangoing experiences with the casualness of someone describing a weekend in Napa. “It was a great trip with Maserati,” he says, reminiscing about the adventure when he broke the record from New York to San Francisco along the Gold Route course, a 13,225-mile route that circumnavigates Cape Horn. A previous record stood for 135 years, recorded by the Flying Cloud, a massive clipper ship that completed the journey in 89 days. That achievement was finally beat by a French team that completed the route in 57 days, 3 hours in 2008. Soldini and his crew obliterated that record five years later, finishing in 47 days, 42 minutes.

Then there was the notorious 1998/1999 Around Alone race, a global circumnavigation that requires competitors to sail solo. The leg across the South Pacific from Auckland, New Zealand, to Punta del Este, Uruguay, is particularly daunting because of its massive waves, freezing temperatures, and up to 4,000-mile isolation from landmass. At 59 degrees latitude south, some 2,000 miles west of Chile, friend and competitor Isabelle Autissier capsized. When her 60-foot sailboat flipped upside down in sub-40-degree water (surrounded by even colder ambient temperatures), Autissier donned a thick survival suit and huddled in an air pocket within the hull. Soldini, alerted of the capsizing, diverted his route more than 200 miles for the faint possibility of rescuing his competitor. But with only an emergency radio beacon and a single Comsat-C satellite-tracking signal, the margin of error for locating the distressed ship was approximately seven miles. The odds of contact were even lower because inclement weather visually blended the water into the sky and massive swells offered only fleeting glimpses of the distressed ship.

Then the improbable happened: Soldini spotted the bobbing hull of Autissier’s boat in the distance. He approached and made two passes, screaming her name in hopes of capturing her attention. When no one emerged, Soldini took a third pass and threw a hammer at the hull, triggering her to crawl out of a hatch. Autissier eventually climbed aboard his boat and joined him for 15 days until he reached Uruguay. “She ate all my food,” he jokes, “but it was OK because Isabelle is a very nice person.”

A race spokesman later told The New York Times, “He’s a very determined person. He’s also got one of the best boats in the fleet, and he knows how to sail it quickly to get where he wants to go.” Despite the diversion, Soldini completed the 26,000-mile journey in 116 days, 20 hours, a new world record that beat the previous title by almost five days.

Despite facing the hazards of a life racing on the open sea for three decades, Soldini remains unfazed, seeking ever-greater challenges both on water and on land.

Soldini’s racing recollections tend to follow a distinct format with two oppositional forces at play: the unrelenting rigor of science, logistics, and planning and the sting of nature’s entropy. The former includes his close working relationship with Guillaume Verdier, the renowned nautical designer known for authoring Team New Zealand’s America’s Cup ship. With Soldini’s countless hours at the helm in some of the most extreme oceangoing conditions and Verdier’s engineering problem solving, the two collaborate on the design of crucial components such as the rudders (the Multi70 has three) and the foil, which has a profile that resembles an airplane wing in order to create the lifting force that makes the ship “fly.” Another key collaborator is meteorological guru Pierre Lasnier, with whom Soldini has worked for more than two decades. His prerace ritual includes one or two full days discussing weather possibilities and contingency plans. “Obviously when you’ve [been doing that] for 20 years,” Soldini says, “you speak the same language and you understand. Each time you know a little bit more, [but] it’s not like mathematics. It’s never sure.”

When considering gut instincts versus scientific data, Soldini recalls his second round-the-world race. He had the instinct on the first leg (from Charleston, South Carolina, to Cape Town, South Africa) to stay on a northerly route before heading east because the Caribbean’s trade winds to the south would have slowed his progress. By remaining in the north’s low-pressure zone, he took the lead and felt confident about his route. However, ten days later, a tropical low-pressure system developed and inverted the conditions, completely reversing the standings. “[The competitors] just killed me,” he recalls. “But if I could do it again, I would do it the same because meteorology is not stable. You need to accept that. That’s life. You try, but you are not God.”

Acceptance might be an essential part of Soldini’s constitution, but it also comes from decades of battling some of nature’s mightiest forces. He has tasted the sweetest of victories, but he has also capsized and crashed. Despite some severe personal nadirs, the deepest cut might have been the loss of longtime friend Andrea Romanelli, a yacht designer who was swept into the ocean during a North Atlantic storm. Romanelli’s body was never recovered. The tragedy almost led Soldini to skip the Around Alone race where he rescued Isabelle Autissier.

“It’s like car racing. You have plenty of high and low moments,” he explains, “but one day you will have an accident. You can have 80-, 90-knot winds or 100-foot waves that can sink even a cargo ship. But it’s like anything, I think. The important thing is to have luck and be prepared, to be able to start again.” Not surprisingly, that element of danger doesn’t diminish much on the rare occasion he returns home to Sarzana, a small medieval town in Italy near Pisa. “I love driving cars and motorcycles,” he says, referring to his Alfa Romeo Giulietta and Honda Hornet 600. And, of course, he also keeps several boats on hand—a small multihull catamaran for local journeys, a cruising boat for family and friends, and a small racing boat he’s loaning out for a competition.

Soldini’s three decades of exposure to the world’s oceans have made him a firsthand witness to the realities of a changing planet. Whereas in 1995, during his first around-the-world circumnavigation, he was able to travel at a latitude of 62 degrees south, now he can’t make the journey below 45 degrees due to ice masses that have separated, or calved, from Antarctica. “It’s crazy,” he says. “It’s scary.”

During the 2017 Transpac race, Soldini and his seven-man crew were about 1,500 miles from Los Angeles when the ship struck an unidentified object at night, dislocating one of the rudders. “You cannot believe how many things are floating around this part of the sea,” he says, suspecting the object that was a propane tank. After assessing the extent of the damage, it appeared the carbon housing around the rudder (known as a cassette) disintegrated, and on-the-spot repairs were not possible. Although they were able to recover the rudder, a particularly expensive part, their inability to maintain full stability during the actual race resulted in a 3- to 4-knot speed reduction that led them to cross the finish line in third place.

In the aftermath of the loss, Soldini employs his usual problem-solving resolve. He is already collaborating with Verdier on a cassette design that would work as a fuse, bending along an axis so it can absorb impact without breaking.

When asked about his attraction to ocean racing, Soldini pauses in search of an explanation. “I don’t know,” he says. “What I really love is the fact that the boat is like a world. You never learn enough. You have everything, but you cannot be good at everything.”

In the years since Soldini started sailing, advances in shipbuilding and onboard electronics have changed the game. Now, his transocean ships contain three satellite-linked computers using 16 IP addresses that enable all the trappings of social-media capture required to compete on the global stage. Despite the technology creep, Soldini’s joy of sailing remains.

“It’s just my life,” he says simply. “I adore it.”

The post Giovanni Soldini, Master of the Sea appeared first on Automobile Magazine.

from PerformanceJunk Feed http://ift.tt/2vc0ewk via IFTTT

from PerformanceJunk WP Feed 3 http://ift.tt/2wLW9Pf via IFTTT

[eddiejpoplar]

Giovanni Soldini, Master of the Sea

Giovanni Soldini turns his weathered face to the Pacific and squints at millions of square miles of cobalt water. What the 51-year-old Italian is pondering is anyone’s guess, but there’s a good chance he’s thinking about the upcoming Transpacific Yacht Race, the storied competition that challenges billionaires, thrill seekers, and bucket-list romantics to traverse 2,225 nautical miles from San Pedro, California’s Point Fermin buoy to the Diamond Head Lighthouse in Honolulu, Hawaii, relying solely on wind power. A legend in the world of long-distance sailing and a national hero in Italy, Soldini looks more like a puckish fisherman compared to the coiffed locals in Southern California’s tony coastal enclave of Marina del Rey. There may be buckets of seafaring adventures swimming in the memory banks behind his hazel eyes, but Soldini gives off a disarming aura of quietude before he gently returns to reality.

The Transpac, as it is commonly referred to, is a 111-year-old race that covers some of the largest, deepest, and most dangerous expanses of water on the planet. This year Soldini will be sailing the Maserati Multi70 trimaran, the first foiling ship of its type to compete in a major open-ocean race. Painstakingly constructed from carbon fiber and titanium, this multimillion-dollar craft was built for the sole purpose of open-water racing. From one-off daggers and cassettes to countless bespoke components, the hardware is dizzying in its specificity, applying Formula 1 levels of engineering to hydrodynamics and weight reduction. In addition to collaborating on the ship’s overall design, Soldini developed flexible solar panels that power the ship’s electronics.

But the Multi70’s X-factor is its ability to “fly,” thanks to a foil that lifts the hull several feet out of the water, thereby dramatically reducing drag and enabling speeds of up to 44 knots—just about 50 mph. The concept is so efficient that the ship can actually exceed the speed of the wind, a party trick that makes for fantastic spectacle at closed-water events like the America’s Cup. But flying ships are unproven on open water, especially along the stretch between California and Hawaii, where a massive vortex of aquatic garbage can threaten the ship’s delicate rudders and foils. Despite a lifetime of sailing experience, the meteorological vagaries of the vast geography and the black art of strategizing a course that capitalizes on the velocity-amplifying power of the wind mean Soldini has his work cut out for him.

Giovanni Soldini became drawn to the ocean in his early teens, but the bond was cemented at 17 when he convinced a 75-year-old American captain to take him sailing across the Atlantic. The route from Palma de Mallorca in the Mediterranean to Antigua in the Caribbean forged an extreme level of adaptability at an age when most kids were getting their kicks playing video games. Soldini didn’t speak English until he picked up the language from the captain. After several months in the Caribbean, he returned home on a Spanish boat, learning Spanish from the crew. “It was fantastic,” he says with a laugh, like a lover reminiscing on the fling that triggered an affair.

“Giovanni’s personality and way of getting his hands dirty and being involved 100 percent reminded John Elkann of the Maserati brothers.”

As his professional sailing career took off, Soldini developed a knack for dominating grueling long-distance ocean races, including the Transat Jacques Vabre (France to Brazil), the San Francisco to Shanghai Tea Clipper Route, the Original Singlehanded Transatlantic Race, and the Transat Québec to Saint-Malo (Canada to France). The relationship with Maserati developed when John Elkann, the Fiat scion who also happens to be the chairman of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, started sailing with Soldini in 2009. Although Soldini originally sought financial support to compete in the Volvo Ocean Race, the relationship with Maserati eventually led to the design and construction of the Multi70 as a way to showcase the brand on a different global stage. The ship also enables would-be Maserati buyers to experience an aspect of the brand’s nonautomotive ventures, acting as a sort of aquatic halo vehicle that could eventually convert sailing experiences into sales.

“By getting to know Giovanni’s personality and passion, somehow [Elkann’s] intuition associated him with Maserati, which a few years ago was still a smaller brand,” says Matteo Sardi, the brand’s North American rep. That plucky marketplace position gave Maserati a unique angle against more household nameplates. “We think of Maserati like a fancy popcorn. It’s not Ferrari. It’s not Lamborghini. Yes, it’s expensive and luxurious, but it’s also made by hand. The people are simpler there. Giovanni’s personality and way of getting his hands dirty and being involved 100 percent reminded [Elkann] a little bit of what he thought about the Maserati brothers.”

Soldini recalls epic oceangoing experiences with the casualness of someone describing a weekend in Napa. “It was a great trip with Maserati,” he says, reminiscing about the adventure when he broke the record from New York to San Francisco along the Gold Route course, a 13,225-mile route that circumnavigates Cape Horn. A previous record stood for 135 years, recorded by the Flying Cloud, a massive clipper ship that completed the journey in 89 days. That achievement was finally beat by a French team that completed the route in 57 days, 3 hours in 2008. Soldini and his crew obliterated that record five years later, finishing in 47 days, 42 minutes.

Then there was the notorious 1998/1999 Around Alone race, a global circumnavigation that requires competitors to sail solo. The leg across the South Pacific from Auckland, New Zealand, to Punta del Este, Uruguay, is particularly daunting because of its massive waves, freezing temperatures, and up to 4,000-mile isolation from landmass. At 59 degrees latitude south, some 2,000 miles west of Chile, friend and competitor Isabelle Autissier capsized. When her 60-foot sailboat flipped upside down in sub-40-degree water (surrounded by even colder ambient temperatures), Autissier donned a thick survival suit and huddled in an air pocket within the hull. Soldini, alerted of the capsizing, diverted his route more than 200 miles for the faint possibility of rescuing his competitor. But with only an emergency radio beacon and a single Comsat-C satellite-tracking signal, the margin of error for locating the distressed ship was approximately seven miles. The odds of contact were even lower because inclement weather visually blended the water into the sky and massive swells offered only fleeting glimpses of the distressed ship.

Then the improbable happened: Soldini spotted the bobbing hull of Autissier’s boat in the distance. He approached and made two passes, screaming her name in hopes of capturing her attention. When no one emerged, Soldini took a third pass and threw a hammer at the hull, triggering her to crawl out of a hatch. Autissier eventually climbed aboard his boat and joined him for 15 days until he reached Uruguay. “She ate all my food,” he jokes, “but it was OK because Isabelle is a very nice person.”

A race spokesman later told The New York Times, “He’s a very determined person. He’s also got one of the best boats in the fleet, and he knows how to sail it quickly to get where he wants to go.” Despite the diversion, Soldini completed the 26,000-mile journey in 116 days, 20 hours, a new world record that beat the previous title by almost five days.

Despite facing the hazards of a life racing on the open sea for three decades, Soldini remains unfazed, seeking ever-greater challenges both on water and on land.

Soldini’s racing recollections tend to follow a distinct format with two oppositional forces at play: the unrelenting rigor of science, logistics, and planning and the sting of nature’s entropy. The former includes his close working relationship with Guillaume Verdier, the renowned nautical designer known for authoring Team New Zealand’s America’s Cup ship. With Soldini’s countless hours at the helm in some of the most extreme oceangoing conditions and Verdier’s engineering problem solving, the two collaborate on the design of crucial components such as the rudders (the Multi70 has three) and the foil, which has a profile that resembles an airplane wing in order to create the lifting force that makes the ship “fly.” Another key collaborator is meteorological guru Pierre Lasnier, with whom Soldini has worked for more than two decades. His prerace ritual includes one or two full days discussing weather possibilities and contingency plans. “Obviously when you’ve [been doing that] for 20 years,” Soldini says, “you speak the same language and you understand. Each time you know a little bit more, [but] it’s not like mathematics. It’s never sure.”

When considering gut instincts versus scientific data, Soldini recalls his second round-the-world race. He had the instinct on the first leg (from Charleston, South Carolina, to Cape Town, South Africa) to stay on a northerly route before heading east because the Caribbean’s trade winds to the south would have slowed his progress. By remaining in the north’s low-pressure zone, he took the lead and felt confident about his route. However, ten days later, a tropical low-pressure system developed and inverted the conditions, completely reversing the standings. “[The competitors] just killed me,” he recalls. “But if I could do it again, I would do it the same because meteorology is not stable. You need to accept that. That’s life. You try, but you are not God.”

Acceptance might be an essential part of Soldini’s constitution, but it also comes from decades of battling some of nature’s mightiest forces. He has tasted the sweetest of victories, but he has also capsized and crashed. Despite some severe personal nadirs, the deepest cut might have been the loss of longtime friend Andrea Romanelli, a yacht designer who was swept into the ocean during a North Atlantic storm. Romanelli’s body was never recovered. The tragedy almost led Soldini to skip the Around Alone race where he rescued Isabelle Autissier.

“It’s like car racing. You have plenty of high and low moments,” he explains, “but one day you will have an accident. You can have 80-, 90-knot winds or 100-foot waves that can sink even a cargo ship. But it’s like anything, I think. The important thing is to have luck and be prepared, to be able to start again.” Not surprisingly, that element of danger doesn’t diminish much on the rare occasion he returns home to Sarzana, a small medieval town in Italy near Pisa. “I love driving cars and motorcycles,” he says, referring to his Alfa Romeo Giulietta and Honda Hornet 600. And, of course, he also keeps several boats on hand—a small multihull catamaran for local journeys, a cruising boat for family and friends, and a small racing boat he’s loaning out for a competition.

Soldini’s three decades of exposure to the world’s oceans have made him a firsthand witness to the realities of a changing planet. Whereas in 1995, during his first around-the-world circumnavigation, he was able to travel at a latitude of 62 degrees south, now he can’t make the journey below 45 degrees due to ice masses that have separated, or calved, from Antarctica. “It’s crazy,” he says. “It’s scary.”

During the 2017 Transpac race, Soldini and his seven-man crew were about 1,500 miles from Los Angeles when the ship struck an unidentified object at night, dislocating one of the rudders. “You cannot believe how many things are floating around this part of the sea,” he says, suspecting the object that was a propane tank. After assessing the extent of the damage, it appeared the carbon housing around the rudder (known as a cassette) disintegrated, and on-the-spot repairs were not possible. Although they were able to recover the rudder, a particularly expensive part, their inability to maintain full stability during the actual race resulted in a 3- to 4-knot speed reduction that led them to cross the finish line in third place.

In the aftermath of the loss, Soldini employs his usual problem-solving resolve. He is already collaborating with Verdier on a cassette design that would work as a fuse, bending along an axis so it can absorb impact without breaking.

When asked about his attraction to ocean racing, Soldini pauses in search of an explanation. “I don’t know,” he says. “What I really love is the fact that the boat is like a world. You never learn enough. You have everything, but you cannot be good at everything.”

In the years since Soldini started sailing, advances in shipbuilding and onboard electronics have changed the game. Now, his transocean ships contain three satellite-linked computers using 16 IP addresses that enable all the trappings of social-media capture required to compete on the global stage. Despite the technology creep, Soldini’s joy of sailing remains.

“It’s just my life,” he says simply. “I adore it.”

The post Giovanni Soldini, Master of the Sea appeared first on Automobile Magazine.

from Performance Junk Blogger 6 http://ift.tt/2vc0ewk via IFTTT

[jonathanbelloblog]

Giovanni Soldini, Master of the Sea

Giovanni Soldini turns his weathered face to the Pacific and squints at millions of square miles of cobalt water. What the 51-year-old Italian is pondering is anyone’s guess, but there’s a good chance he’s thinking about the upcoming Transpacific Yacht Race, the storied competition that challenges billionaires, thrill seekers, and bucket-list romantics to traverse 2,225 nautical miles from San Pedro, California’s Point Fermin buoy to the Diamond Head Lighthouse in Honolulu, Hawaii, relying solely on wind power. A legend in the world of long-distance sailing and a national hero in Italy, Soldini looks more like a puckish fisherman compared to the coiffed locals in Southern California’s tony coastal enclave of Marina del Rey. There may be buckets of seafaring adventures swimming in the memory banks behind his hazel eyes, but Soldini gives off a disarming aura of quietude before he gently returns to reality.

The Transpac, as it is commonly referred to, is a 111-year-old race that covers some of the largest, deepest, and most dangerous expanses of water on the planet. This year Soldini will be sailing the Maserati Multi70 trimaran, the first foiling ship of its type to compete in a major open-ocean race. Painstakingly constructed from carbon fiber and titanium, this multimillion-dollar craft was built for the sole purpose of open-water racing. From one-off daggers and cassettes to countless bespoke components, the hardware is dizzying in its specificity, applying Formula 1 levels of engineering to hydrodynamics and weight reduction. In addition to collaborating on the ship’s overall design, Soldini developed flexible solar panels that power the ship’s electronics.

But the Multi70’s X-factor is its ability to “fly,” thanks to a foil that lifts the hull several feet out of the water, thereby dramatically reducing drag and enabling speeds of up to 44 knots—just about 50 mph. The concept is so efficient that the ship can actually exceed the speed of the wind, a party trick that makes for fantastic spectacle at closed-water events like the America’s Cup. But flying ships are unproven on open water, especially along the stretch between California and Hawaii, where a massive vortex of aquatic garbage can threaten the ship’s delicate rudders and foils. Despite a lifetime of sailing experience, the meteorological vagaries of the vast geography and the black art of strategizing a course that capitalizes on the velocity-amplifying power of the wind mean Soldini has his work cut out for him.

Giovanni Soldini became drawn to the ocean in his early teens, but the bond was cemented at 17 when he convinced a 75-year-old American captain to take him sailing across the Atlantic. The route from Palma de Mallorca in the Mediterranean to Antigua in the Caribbean forged an extreme level of adaptability at an age when most kids were getting their kicks playing video games. Soldini didn’t speak English until he picked up the language from the captain. After several months in the Caribbean, he returned home on a Spanish boat, learning Spanish from the crew. “It was fantastic,” he says with a laugh, like a lover reminiscing on the fling that triggered an affair.

“Giovanni’s personality and way of getting his hands dirty and being involved 100 percent reminded John Elkann of the Maserati brothers.”

As his professional sailing career took off, Soldini developed a knack for dominating grueling long-distance ocean races, including the Transat Jacques Vabre (France to Brazil), the San Francisco to Shanghai Tea Clipper Route, the Original Singlehanded Transatlantic Race, and the Transat Québec to Saint-Malo (Canada to France). The relationship with Maserati developed when John Elkann, the Fiat scion who also happens to be the chairman of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, started sailing with Soldini in 2009. Although Soldini originally sought financial support to compete in the Volvo Ocean Race, the relationship with Maserati eventually led to the design and construction of the Multi70 as a way to showcase the brand on a different global stage. The ship also enables would-be Maserati buyers to experience an aspect of the brand’s nonautomotive ventures, acting as a sort of aquatic halo vehicle that could eventually convert sailing experiences into sales.

“By getting to know Giovanni’s personality and passion, somehow [Elkann’s] intuition associated him with Maserati, which a few years ago was still a smaller brand,” says Matteo Sardi, the brand’s North American rep. That plucky marketplace position gave Maserati a unique angle against more household nameplates. “We think of Maserati like a fancy popcorn. It’s not Ferrari. It’s not Lamborghini. Yes, it’s expensive and luxurious, but it’s also made by hand. The people are simpler there. Giovanni’s personality and way of getting his hands dirty and being involved 100 percent reminded [Elkann] a little bit of what he thought about the Maserati brothers.”

Soldini recalls epic oceangoing experiences with the casualness of someone describing a weekend in Napa. “It was a great trip with Maserati,” he says, reminiscing about the adventure when he broke the record from New York to San Francisco along the Gold Route course, a 13,225-mile route that circumnavigates Cape Horn. A previous record stood for 135 years, recorded by the Flying Cloud, a massive clipper ship that completed the journey in 89 days. That achievement was finally beat by a French team that completed the route in 57 days, 3 hours in 2008. Soldini and his crew obliterated that record five years later, finishing in 47 days, 42 minutes.

Then there was the notorious 1998/1999 Around Alone race, a global circumnavigation that requires competitors to sail solo. The leg across the South Pacific from Auckland, New Zealand, to Punta del Este, Uruguay, is particularly daunting because of its massive waves, freezing temperatures, and up to 4,000-mile isolation from landmass. At 59 degrees latitude south, some 2,000 miles west of Chile, friend and competitor Isabelle Autissier capsized. When her 60-foot sailboat flipped upside down in sub-40-degree water (surrounded by even colder ambient temperatures), Autissier donned a thick survival suit and huddled in an air pocket within the hull. Soldini, alerted of the capsizing, diverted his route more than 200 miles for the faint possibility of rescuing his competitor. But with only an emergency radio beacon and a single Comsat-C satellite-tracking signal, the margin of error for locating the distressed ship was approximately seven miles. The odds of contact were even lower because inclement weather visually blended the water into the sky and massive swells offered only fleeting glimpses of the distressed ship.

Then the improbable happened: Soldini spotted the bobbing hull of Autissier’s boat in the distance. He approached and made two passes, screaming her name in hopes of capturing her attention. When no one emerged, Soldini took a third pass and threw a hammer at the hull, triggering her to crawl out of a hatch. Autissier eventually climbed aboard his boat and joined him for 15 days until he reached Uruguay. “She ate all my food,” he jokes, “but it was OK because Isabelle is a very nice person.”

A race spokesman later told The New York Times, “He’s a very determined person. He’s also got one of the best boats in the fleet, and he knows how to sail it quickly to get where he wants to go.” Despite the diversion, Soldini completed the 26,000-mile journey in 116 days, 20 hours, a new world record that beat the previous title by almost five days.

Despite facing the hazards of a life racing on the open sea for three decades, Soldini remains unfazed, seeking ever-greater challenges both on water and on land.

Soldini’s racing recollections tend to follow a distinct format with two oppositional forces at play: the unrelenting rigor of science, logistics, and planning and the sting of nature’s entropy. The former includes his close working relationship with Guillaume Verdier, the renowned nautical designer known for authoring Team New Zealand’s America’s Cup ship. With Soldini’s countless hours at the helm in some of the most extreme oceangoing conditions and Verdier’s engineering problem solving, the two collaborate on the design of crucial components such as the rudders (the Multi70 has three) and the foil, which has a profile that resembles an airplane wing in order to create the lifting force that makes the ship “fly.” Another key collaborator is meteorological guru Pierre Lasnier, with whom Soldini has worked for more than two decades. His prerace ritual includes one or two full days discussing weather possibilities and contingency plans. “Obviously when you’ve [been doing that] for 20 years,” Soldini says, “you speak the same language and you understand. Each time you know a little bit more, [but] it’s not like mathematics. It’s never sure.”

When considering gut instincts versus scientific data, Soldini recalls his second round-the-world race. He had the instinct on the first leg (from Charleston, South Carolina, to Cape Town, South Africa) to stay on a northerly route before heading east because the Caribbean’s trade winds to the south would have slowed his progress. By remaining in the north’s low-pressure zone, he took the lead and felt confident about his route. However, ten days later, a tropical low-pressure system developed and inverted the conditions, completely reversing the standings. “[The competitors] just killed me,” he recalls. “But if I could do it again, I would do it the same because meteorology is not stable. You need to accept that. That’s life. You try, but you are not God.”

Acceptance might be an essential part of Soldini’s constitution, but it also comes from decades of battling some of nature’s mightiest forces. He has tasted the sweetest of victories, but he has also capsized and crashed. Despite some severe personal nadirs, the deepest cut might have been the loss of longtime friend Andrea Romanelli, a yacht designer who was swept into the ocean during a North Atlantic storm. Romanelli’s body was never recovered. The tragedy almost led Soldini to skip the Around Alone race where he rescued Isabelle Autissier.

“It’s like car racing. You have plenty of high and low moments,” he explains, “but one day you will have an accident. You can have 80-, 90-knot winds or 100-foot waves that can sink even a cargo ship. But it’s like anything, I think. The important thing is to have luck and be prepared, to be able to start again.” Not surprisingly, that element of danger doesn’t diminish much on the rare occasion he returns home to Sarzana, a small medieval town in Italy near Pisa. “I love driving cars and motorcycles,” he says, referring to his Alfa Romeo Giulietta and Honda Hornet 600. And, of course, he also keeps several boats on hand—a small multihull catamaran for local journeys, a cruising boat for family and friends, and a small racing boat he’s loaning out for a competition.

Soldini’s three decades of exposure to the world’s oceans have made him a firsthand witness to the realities of a changing planet. Whereas in 1995, during his first around-the-world circumnavigation, he was able to travel at a latitude of 62 degrees south, now he can’t make the journey below 45 degrees due to ice masses that have separated, or calved, from Antarctica. “It’s crazy,” he says. “It’s scary.”

During the 2017 Transpac race, Soldini and his seven-man crew were about 1,500 miles from Los Angeles when the ship struck an unidentified object at night, dislocating one of the rudders. “You cannot believe how many things are floating around this part of the sea,” he says, suspecting the object that was a propane tank. After assessing the extent of the damage, it appeared the carbon housing around the rudder (known as a cassette) disintegrated, and on-the-spot repairs were not possible. Although they were able to recover the rudder, a particularly expensive part, their inability to maintain full stability during the actual race resulted in a 3- to 4-knot speed reduction that led them to cross the finish line in third place.

In the aftermath of the loss, Soldini employs his usual problem-solving resolve. He is already collaborating with Verdier on a cassette design that would work as a fuse, bending along an axis so it can absorb impact without breaking.

When asked about his attraction to ocean racing, Soldini pauses in search of an explanation. “I don’t know,” he says. “What I really love is the fact that the boat is like a world. You never learn enough. You have everything, but you cannot be good at everything.”

In the years since Soldini started sailing, advances in shipbuilding and onboard electronics have changed the game. Now, his transocean ships contain three satellite-linked computers using 16 IP addresses that enable all the trappings of social-media capture required to compete on the global stage. Despite the technology creep, Soldini’s joy of sailing remains.

“It’s just my life,” he says simply. “I adore it.”

The post Giovanni Soldini, Master of the Sea appeared first on Automobile Magazine.

from Performance Junk Blogger Feed 4 http://ift.tt/2vc0ewk via IFTTT

[jesusvasser]

Giovanni Soldini, Master of the Sea

Giovanni Soldini turns his weathered face to the Pacific and squints at millions of square miles of cobalt water. What the 51-year-old Italian is pondering is anyone’s guess, but there’s a good chance he’s thinking about the upcoming Transpacific Yacht Race, the storied competition that challenges billionaires, thrill seekers, and bucket-list romantics to traverse 2,225 nautical miles from San Pedro, California’s Point Fermin buoy to the Diamond Head Lighthouse in Honolulu, Hawaii, relying solely on wind power. A legend in the world of long-distance sailing and a national hero in Italy, Soldini looks more like a puckish fisherman compared to the coiffed locals in Southern California’s tony coastal enclave of Marina del Rey. There may be buckets of seafaring adventures swimming in the memory banks behind his hazel eyes, but Soldini gives off a disarming aura of quietude before he gently returns to reality.

The Transpac, as it is commonly referred to, is a 111-year-old race that covers some of the largest, deepest, and most dangerous expanses of water on the planet. This year Soldini will be sailing the Maserati Multi70 trimaran, the first foiling ship of its type to compete in a major open-ocean race. Painstakingly constructed from carbon fiber and titanium, this multimillion-dollar craft was built for the sole purpose of open-water racing. From one-off daggers and cassettes to countless bespoke components, the hardware is dizzying in its specificity, applying Formula 1 levels of engineering to hydrodynamics and weight reduction. In addition to collaborating on the ship’s overall design, Soldini developed flexible solar panels that power the ship’s electronics.

But the Multi70’s X-factor is its ability to “fly,” thanks to a foil that lifts the hull several feet out of the water, thereby dramatically reducing drag and enabling speeds of up to 44 knots—just about 50 mph. The concept is so efficient that the ship can actually exceed the speed of the wind, a party trick that makes for fantastic spectacle at closed-water events like the America’s Cup. But flying ships are unproven on open water, especially along the stretch between California and Hawaii, where a massive vortex of aquatic garbage can threaten the ship’s delicate rudders and foils. Despite a lifetime of sailing experience, the meteorological vagaries of the vast geography and the black art of strategizing a course that capitalizes on the velocity-amplifying power of the wind mean Soldini has his work cut out for him.

Giovanni Soldini became drawn to the ocean in his early teens, but the bond was cemented at 17 when he convinced a 75-year-old American captain to take him sailing across the Atlantic. The route from Palma de Mallorca in the Mediterranean to Antigua in the Caribbean forged an extreme level of adaptability at an age when most kids were getting their kicks playing video games. Soldini didn’t speak English until he picked up the language from the captain. After several months in the Caribbean, he returned home on a Spanish boat, learning Spanish from the crew. “It was fantastic,” he says with a laugh, like a lover reminiscing on the fling that triggered an affair.

“Giovanni’s personality and way of getting his hands dirty and being involved 100 percent reminded John Elkann of the Maserati brothers.”

As his professional sailing career took off, Soldini developed a knack for dominating grueling long-distance ocean races, including the Transat Jacques Vabre (France to Brazil), the San Francisco to Shanghai Tea Clipper Route, the Original Singlehanded Transatlantic Race, and the Transat Québec to Saint-Malo (Canada to France). The relationship with Maserati developed when John Elkann, the Fiat scion who also happens to be the chairman of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, started sailing with Soldini in 2009. Although Soldini originally sought financial support to compete in the Volvo Ocean Race, the relationship with Maserati eventually led to the design and construction of the Multi70 as a way to showcase the brand on a different global stage. The ship also enables would-be Maserati buyers to experience an aspect of the brand’s nonautomotive ventures, acting as a sort of aquatic halo vehicle that could eventually convert sailing experiences into sales.

“By getting to know Giovanni’s personality and passion, somehow [Elkann’s] intuition associated him with Maserati, which a few years ago was still a smaller brand,” says Matteo Sardi, the brand’s North American rep. That plucky marketplace position gave Maserati a unique angle against more household nameplates. “We think of Maserati like a fancy popcorn. It’s not Ferrari. It’s not Lamborghini. Yes, it’s expensive and luxurious, but it’s also made by hand. The people are simpler there. Giovanni’s personality and way of getting his hands dirty and being involved 100 percent reminded [Elkann] a little bit of what he thought about the Maserati brothers.”

Soldini recalls epic oceangoing experiences with the casualness of someone describing a weekend in Napa. “It was a great trip with Maserati,” he says, reminiscing about the adventure when he broke the record from New York to San Francisco along the Gold Route course, a 13,225-mile route that circumnavigates Cape Horn. A previous record stood for 135 years, recorded by the Flying Cloud, a massive clipper ship that completed the journey in 89 days. That achievement was finally beat by a French team that completed the route in 57 days, 3 hours in 2008. Soldini and his crew obliterated that record five years later, finishing in 47 days, 42 minutes.

Then there was the notorious 1998/1999 Around Alone race, a global circumnavigation that requires competitors to sail solo. The leg across the South Pacific from Auckland, New Zealand, to Punta del Este, Uruguay, is particularly daunting because of its massive waves, freezing temperatures, and up to 4,000-mile isolation from landmass. At 59 degrees latitude south, some 2,000 miles west of Chile, friend and competitor Isabelle Autissier capsized. When her 60-foot sailboat flipped upside down in sub-40-degree water (surrounded by even colder ambient temperatures), Autissier donned a thick survival suit and huddled in an air pocket within the hull. Soldini, alerted of the capsizing, diverted his route more than 200 miles for the faint possibility of rescuing his competitor. But with only an emergency radio beacon and a single Comsat-C satellite-tracking signal, the margin of error for locating the distressed ship was approximately seven miles. The odds of contact were even lower because inclement weather visually blended the water into the sky and massive swells offered only fleeting glimpses of the distressed ship.

Then the improbable happened: Soldini spotted the bobbing hull of Autissier’s boat in the distance. He approached and made two passes, screaming her name in hopes of capturing her attention. When no one emerged, Soldini took a third pass and threw a hammer at the hull, triggering her to crawl out of a hatch. Autissier eventually climbed aboard his boat and joined him for 15 days until he reached Uruguay. “She ate all my food,” he jokes, “but it was OK because Isabelle is a very nice person.”

A race spokesman later told The New York Times, “He’s a very determined person. He’s also got one of the best boats in the fleet, and he knows how to sail it quickly to get where he wants to go.” Despite the diversion, Soldini completed the 26,000-mile journey in 116 days, 20 hours, a new world record that beat the previous title by almost five days.

Despite facing the hazards of a life racing on the open sea for three decades, Soldini remains unfazed, seeking ever-greater challenges both on water and on land.

Soldini’s racing recollections tend to follow a distinct format with two oppositional forces at play: the unrelenting rigor of science, logistics, and planning and the sting of nature’s entropy. The former includes his close working relationship with Guillaume Verdier, the renowned nautical designer known for authoring Team New Zealand’s America’s Cup ship. With Soldini’s countless hours at the helm in some of the most extreme oceangoing conditions and Verdier’s engineering problem solving, the two collaborate on the design of crucial components such as the rudders (the Multi70 has three) and the foil, which has a profile that resembles an airplane wing in order to create the lifting force that makes the ship “fly.” Another key collaborator is meteorological guru Pierre Lasnier, with whom Soldini has worked for more than two decades. His prerace ritual includes one or two full days discussing weather possibilities and contingency plans. “Obviously when you’ve [been doing that] for 20 years,” Soldini says, “you speak the same language and you understand. Each time you know a little bit more, [but] it’s not like mathematics. It’s never sure.”

When considering gut instincts versus scientific data, Soldini recalls his second round-the-world race. He had the instinct on the first leg (from Charleston, South Carolina, to Cape Town, South Africa) to stay on a northerly route before heading east because the Caribbean’s trade winds to the south would have slowed his progress. By remaining in the north’s low-pressure zone, he took the lead and felt confident about his route. However, ten days later, a tropical low-pressure system developed and inverted the conditions, completely reversing the standings. “[The competitors] just killed me,” he recalls. “But if I could do it again, I would do it the same because meteorology is not stable. You need to accept that. That’s life. You try, but you are not God.”

Acceptance might be an essential part of Soldini’s constitution, but it also comes from decades of battling some of nature’s mightiest forces. He has tasted the sweetest of victories, but he has also capsized and crashed. Despite some severe personal nadirs, the deepest cut might have been the loss of longtime friend Andrea Romanelli, a yacht designer who was swept into the ocean during a North Atlantic storm. Romanelli’s body was never recovered. The tragedy almost led Soldini to skip the Around Alone race where he rescued Isabelle Autissier.

“It’s like car racing. You have plenty of high and low moments,” he explains, “but one day you will have an accident. You can have 80-, 90-knot winds or 100-foot waves that can sink even a cargo ship. But it’s like anything, I think. The important thing is to have luck and be prepared, to be able to start again.” Not surprisingly, that element of danger doesn’t diminish much on the rare occasion he returns home to Sarzana, a small medieval town in Italy near Pisa. “I love driving cars and motorcycles,” he says, referring to his Alfa Romeo Giulietta and Honda Hornet 600. And, of course, he also keeps several boats on hand—a small multihull catamaran for local journeys, a cruising boat for family and friends, and a small racing boat he’s loaning out for a competition.

Soldini’s three decades of exposure to the world’s oceans have made him a firsthand witness to the realities of a changing planet. Whereas in 1995, during his first around-the-world circumnavigation, he was able to travel at a latitude of 62 degrees south, now he can’t make the journey below 45 degrees due to ice masses that have separated, or calved, from Antarctica. “It’s crazy,” he says. “It’s scary.”

During the 2017 Transpac race, Soldini and his seven-man crew were about 1,500 miles from Los Angeles when the ship struck an unidentified object at night, dislocating one of the rudders. “You cannot believe how many things are floating around this part of the sea,” he says, suspecting the object that was a propane tank. After assessing the extent of the damage, it appeared the carbon housing around the rudder (known as a cassette) disintegrated, and on-the-spot repairs were not possible. Although they were able to recover the rudder, a particularly expensive part, their inability to maintain full stability during the actual race resulted in a 3- to 4-knot speed reduction that led them to cross the finish line in third place.

In the aftermath of the loss, Soldini employs his usual problem-solving resolve. He is already collaborating with Verdier on a cassette design that would work as a fuse, bending along an axis so it can absorb impact without breaking.

When asked about his attraction to ocean racing, Soldini pauses in search of an explanation. “I don’t know,” he says. “What I really love is the fact that the boat is like a world. You never learn enough. You have everything, but you cannot be good at everything.”

In the years since Soldini started sailing, advances in shipbuilding and onboard electronics have changed the game. Now, his transocean ships contain three satellite-linked computers using 16 IP addresses that enable all the trappings of social-media capture required to compete on the global stage. Despite the technology creep, Soldini’s joy of sailing remains.

“It’s just my life,” he says simply. “I adore it.”

The post Giovanni Soldini, Master of the Sea appeared first on Automobile Magazine.

from Performance Junk WP Feed 4 http://ift.tt/2vc0ewk via IFTTT