News

September 10, 2007

Salthouse, Auckland (New Zealand) will be the shipyard building the new addition to the Mean Machine family

The announcement was made in Hyeres, France, where the team take on the last Breitling MedCup event in this year’s Circuit which is due to finish on Saturday



It’s no secret that the Mean Machine team feels at home in various places all over the world, from Holland to Spain to New Zealand… so it’s been no surprise to most that the new Mean Machine will be built in NZ, especially since the current boat is also a Kiwi by birth.

The small but highly professional shipyard Salthouse has been chosen for the construction of the new boat which is due to start early this autumn.

“New Zealand in general has a very high profile in boat-building,” says team founder Peter de Ridder. “Cost-wise for instance it would be better to build in the US with the USD so weak. But I am aiming primarily for quality, so that’s why we’re going to NZ. Salthouse looks to me the better option, being one of the smaller yards in NZ. This will mean that we will end up with a kind of an in-house build of the boat, where we can put lots of our own skills and knowledge into he project, making sure we will get the boat we want”.

Following on from their history of teamwork, various members of the team will be involved in the design and building process: “Chris Reid and Dean Money will be involved with the build, and having Ray Davies and Tom Dodson around and involved will make overseeing the construction on almost a daily basis feasible. It helps a lot when the lines of communication are that short”.

Peter de Ridder on the type of boat we’ll see coming out of the Rolf Vrolijk studio, and what his boat will say about the new generation of TP 52s coming through: “You certainly will see a boat coming out of the yard which will have common characteristics with the 2007 crop of J/V boats. It’s an evolutionary process, which started with our 2006 boat. No reason, looking at the performance of the 2007 boats to make any dramatic change.

I would say that we will have a pretty allround boat. Although our boat and for sure also the 2007 J/V boats have been designed for the Med (i.e. mean wind range 10-13 knots), they show afterall a very good performance over a much wider wind range”.