How an Obsessive Sailor and His Fitness Trackers Supercharged Yacht Racing

In his Santa Cruz shop, Kahn’s team has created new daggerboards, replacing the so-called C-foils with L-foils that angle inward to provide controlled lift to the hulls. They’re the same basic design as those in the AC72. Without foils, a boat’s speed is limited by the drag of the hulls. “But once you get the foils out on a cat,” says Kahn, “there’s nothing but a little bit of drag that keeps you from going faster and faster and faster” — up to 30 knots at its fastest so far. Kahn’s boat is one of the first of its size to try foiling like this.

At Kahn’s home on the docks — built there for easy access to the harbor’s boat ramp — he shows off the foils as Pegasus sits beached on his driveway. They’re thin, tapered fins with a gently curving S-shape. At the Pegasus workshop, filled with dripping resin and flying fiberglass, Kahn’s team shapes them by layering sheets of carbon into wooden molds.

That shape has remained largely unchanged, but there’s one more crucial element: the elevator, the bottom to the foil’s “L” that provides that crucial lift. It attaches to the fin separately, allowing the team to make minute changes that could make all the difference in the boat’s foiling hydrodynamics.

Kahn got his first taste of the water on the coast of France, where he began windsurfing as a 14-year-old. To see him sailing on his heavily modded cat with Christensen is to see that teenage adrenaline junkie sparring with the wind. Almost as soon as the boat leaves the harbor, Kahn is off the boat, feet straddling the side of the hull as his body dangles off the edge. He’s held in place by a trapeze attached to his body harness. A long tiller extension allows him to steer a sailboat that he technically isn’t even on.

Pointing to the winglets placed perpendicular to the boat’s two normal rudders (another source of lift, along with the foils), Kahn describes his beast as “more like an airplane than a sailboat.” But that comparison is most apt when the boat gets going in the 12-knot breeze off the coast of Santa Cruz. Every time the boat hits 11 knots or so, the cat’s stiff, lightweight carbon body rises above the waves, revealing a glimmer of sunlight between the water and the base of the hulls.

The wind isn’t quite as strong as the boat would like it, and ocean swells break over its twin bows, driving the boat back into the water almost as soon as it starts to rise. But those brief moments, the hulls hovering weightlessly over the water, are mesmerizing.

“I can’t say how cool it is,” says Kahn. “The feeling is really that of flying.”

The boat’s clearly still in experimental mode. As Christensen and Kahn leap over the waves, sea water sloshes through roughly hewn holes where the daggerboards pierce the hulls. Ideally, those holes will be plugged, eliminating the drag from the water inside. But “that’s the last half of a percent of performance,” says Kahn — and the boat still has plenty of optimization ahead.
  One of the original prototypes for a sleep and motion tracker that Kahn used on his Transpac races.

Karsyn Elledge takes next step in racing career

SONOMA, Calif. — Karsyn Elledge likes playing with her phone, computer and riding her bike.

When she’s not racing, of course.

Elledge, the 12-year-old niece of Dale Earnhardt Jr., is taking a big step up in her racing career this summer by heading west with her father. She unveiled Saturday at Sonoma Raceway the No. 3 mini outlaw sprint kart that she and Jimmy Elledge will take to 12 races across the West Coast during her break from school.

“It’s been really easy for her from the start. She hasn’t had to have a lot of guidance or direction,” Elledge said. “She won the first three races she ever drove, so the fourth race was really hard because she lost. So I felt like it was safe because of the full containment seats and the wings, and I thought it was going to be able to teach her a lot of life lessons about sportsmanship and competing and life in general.”

Elledge also wanted his daughter, who has won all but two races she’s competed in this year in her box stock car, to take a step up in competition.

“I figured out here, the competition level is so much higher,” Elledge said. “I figured if we could get her out here to compete in this class at the race tracks where Kyle Larson and Brad Sweet and a lot of those boys have competed, we can expose her to higher levels.”

Karsyn, who received a text message from uncle Dale to calm her nerves right before her news conference to unveil the car and announce Nickelodeon had signed on as sponsor, said she’s excited to take the next step.

“It’s very fun, and not just because it’s my family thing. It’s just interesting and so much fun. I love it,” she said. “I’m excited to compete at a higher level because it will only make me better and give me experience.”

The rising eighth grader has had several occasions to talk racing with her favorite driver, Danica Patrick.

“I’m a very big Danica Patrick fan. She’s like my idol,” Karsyn said. “She’s a girl and she races and she shows that girls can do it, too.”

The only drawback to Karsyn’s summer adventure is her admitted apprehension to traveling all across the coast with her father.

“It’s going to be interesting because I don’t like traveling in the car for a long time. I get really bored,” she said. “It’s going to be fun traveling with my dad, but also hard, boring, interesting. It’s going to be a lot of different things.”