Leave It to Chance

When Intrepid scored her startling victory over Valiant in last month's America's Cup trials, the least surprised man in Newport was Britton Chance Jr., the young naval architect who had taken the old 1967 Cup winner and redesigned her into the 1970 Cup defender. To Chance's mind, the outcome was decided last winter in a test tank in Hoboken, N.J. There, like some bathtub admiral, he spent four months testing 75 different model hulls until "I felt we had a winning design for Intrepid.'" Chance was sure of it when he saw the first photograph of Valiant under sail. "I could tell from the shape of her wake that she was in trouble," he says, and adds: "There was no turning point. We had it all season."

If confidence is what it takes to defeat the Australian challenger Gretel II when the America's Cup begins this week, Brit Chance obviously has enough to spare. Indeed, some old salts find him downright arrogant. Defeating Valiant was one thing, they say, but criticizing the boat's designer. Olin Stephens, 62, the man who practically invented the 12-meter sloop, is akin to lese-majeste. But Chance isn't listening; he is too busy explaining why Stephens, after designing three of the last four Cup winners, was all but swamped by the new Intrepid. "Olin works very slowly," says Chance. "He gets in trouble with some aspects of his tank tests and ends up confused by the results."

Space-Age Principles. Chance is an unabashed advocate of applying space-age principles to the ancient art of boat building. It is no accident that his chief engineer, Eric Hall, used to work for Grumman Corp., the people who built the Apollo lunar module. Experimenting with tensile strengths and thermal coefficients. Chance refitted the old Intrepid with exotic lightweight metals --beryllium on the top of the mast, magnesium for the winches, boron graphite for the boom--to cut the weight of these vital fittings up to 65%.

In the cockpit, he introduced some of the most sophisticated electronic gear ever carried on a sailboat, including a tape device that plots the boat's course as well as a small computer that tells Skipper Bill Ficker his true speed toward the mark (as opposed to speed through the water). Below the waterline, Chance installed a smaller keel and restyled the stern with a V-shaped bustle. Result: a remarkable 18% increase in Intrepid 's theoretical speed.

Though some traditionalists would like to dismiss Chance as a brash upstart, at 30 he is actually a year older than Stephens was when he helped design the 1937 Cup winner. Ranger. And, like the old master, he is very much to the manner born. A product of Philadelphia's Main Line, Chance has been a water baby "since my mother dropped me overboard when I was two." His father won a yachting gold medal in the 1952 Olympics. Sisters Jan and Elli are top small-boat skippers, while Uncle Henry is a noted ocean racer. Brit Jr. began sailing tiny sneak boxes on New Jersey's Barnegat Bay, moved on to the E scows his grandfather imported from the Great Lakes. After three years of studying physics at the University of Rochester, he quit school to apply his test-tank theories in open waters. Success came quickly; his innovative 5.5-meter designs, for example, have so far won four world championships, as well as gold and silver medals in the 1968 Olympics.

As for 12-meters, it was only logical that the Intrepid syndicate decided to take a chance on Chance. He has been involved with the America's Cup since 1962, when he helped design one boat and crewed on another. Three years ago, he designed an advanced 12-meter, Chanceggar, to serve as a model for the unsuccessful bid of the French to win the Cup. At the time, there was talk that the New York Yacht Club, holders of the Cup, should prevent Chance from aiding a challenger. His reaction is typical: "My own attitude is that if the French had won the America's Cup, the New York Yacht Club could only have blamed itself for not ordering a new boat from me. Besides, designing Chanceggar provided experience without which we couldn't have improved Intrepid as much as we have."

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