
Cape Horn Engineering worked closely with Italian designer Matteo Polli on performance prediction and CFD analysis for the Italia Yacht 998 Fuoriserie. The owner’s previous boat had a keel optimised by us and was very successful, winning the ORC worlds, European and Italian championship in its category several times.
The task for the new project was to have a smaller boat able to compete in the same category at the top level. So the boat had to be quicker for its length compared to its predecessor, to be able to sail at the front of the fleet, but keeping the best performance/rating ratio.
Working with the designer we identified a first set of hulls to test with a full CFD matrix, producing data to feed a Velocity Prediction Program that was compared with the official ORCi VPP. The data from the previous successful boat were very valuable and she was a reference quite hard to beat. After refining the hull shape some improvements were achieved for the keel taking advantage of our experience in keel optimisation, the ORCi rule and the trends that were evident from the VPP data.
The new boat has proven to be competitive, fast and fun from the first day of sailing and began competing in local races to set up the boat and the sails, showing excellent performance and starting a winning streak that culminated with the victory at the ORC World Championship in Barcelona.
We congratulate the owner, the designer and the crew for this fantastic success story.