“Foiling really appealed to me when I saw the America’s Cup guys flying around up in the air at 40 knots. With foils, I knew there would be a lot of room to innovate in terms of design. With regular boards, you are mostly refining details and it’s only once in a while that you find a significant breakthrough: lighter technologies, thinner boards, inflatable planing boards, cut-away designs. After a while, everybody has something similar and we’re refining in terms of millimetres. This is when I get a bit bored. We need to put in a lot of energy and resources to get smaller returns. This is Remi Vila’s strength. He loves that kind of challenge, to find those advancements that give us the edge. I enjoy hashing out new things like foils so naturally, I jumped on the opportunity.
STARTING POINT
When foils came along there were so many new ideas out there to work with. The main challenge with foils is how to deal with the fact that the faster they go, the more they lift. When we first started foils at Starboard with Rush Randle fourteen years ago, I believed that the future was in self-regulating foils. This type of foil is shaped and positioned in such a way that their wetted surface area would reduce with speed. The faster you go, the higher the foil lifts. The higher the foil lifts, the less wing area is under water. With less area under water, less lift is generated. This circular formula creates a self-regulating foil that finds its own equilibrium state at any speed so you don’t have to make manual adjustments. You can also create self-regulation using flaps that are mechanically adjusted against the height of the hull above water. Foil Moths use this method, for example. Today, the popular foils for windsurfing are not self-regulating: with wind foiling, the first thing you’ll learn is to trim the lift by leaning forwards to reduce the wing’s angle of attack as you accelerate and go faster. Even though our very first foils were the classic T-foil, I insisted on building self-regulating prototypes. Eventually, I figured out that I should also design a conventional T foil so I started afresh and pushed the self-regulating foil towards a different direction.
For the Starboard foil as it is available today, ideas started from the last time I was in the UK visiting windsurfing shops and centres. The funny thing was that aside from the weather, all the guys were talking about foils and all the new ideas that were floating around. There is no denying windsurfing is a tough market right now but the excitement with foils was really a breath of fresh air. There was that old glitter in everyone’s eyes talking about foils. Like those days when people started planing, adding footstraps to their boards, chopping up long boards to turn them into funboards. That glitter in the eye, it inspired me to put our foil projects into hyperdrive. I bought a kite foil, took it back to Thailand and that was my starting point. Of course, it was horrible.
From there at least I had a starting point.
