‘Anything to give me that edge’: Glenn Ashby’s need for speed
He was among the world’s best sailors but Glenn Ashby has sensationally turned his back on the water to chase unthinkable speed records — powered only by the wind.
Picture this scene: it’s a day in late 1984 in Victoria, Australia. Bob Hawke is 18 months into his prime ministership; Stevie Wonder’s I Just Called To Say I Love You is riding high in the charts. And on a quiet road beside the bush in Spring Gully, Bendigo, seven-year-old Glenn Ashby stands before the oddest of contraptions: a skateboard that’s modified to be powered by the wind. It has a mast fashioned from a timber curtain rod, cut down to size and expertly fixed in place; it has sails made from an old double bedsheet, cut up and sewn just-so. On this blustery summer’s day young Glenn steps onto the skateboard, and as the sails fill with air he feels the delicious acceleration, the windrush and vibrations increasing. He’s a skilful lad with a crazy-brave streak: he leans into the speed until he’s whizzing down the road, his senses in overdrive, enthralled by the idea of harnessing this invisible force provided by Mother Nature. And he wonders, even then as a seven-year-old, just how far you could take this wind-powered speed lark. He wonders, How fast could I possibly go?
Fast-forward four decades, to February 2023. At the vast, dazzling white salt flats of Lake Gairdner in outback South Australia, Glenn Ashby stands before another odd contraption: a 2.6-tonne, carbon fibre, motorless rocketship. A sleek, coolly menacing machine: it looks like it means business. Picture a missile on its side, with an 11m-tall rigid “sail” and an outrigger, all of it riding on wheels. It’s the land yacht they call Horonuku, a Maori name meaning “gliding swiftly across the land”. Horonuku is Ashby’s baby, brought to life in collaboration with a crack bunch of engineers and designers from Emirates Team New Zealand, with whom he previously won two America’s Cups as an elite sailor. He looks out over the endless white salt flats of Lake Gairdner. This place is hallowed ground for a certain breed of Australian revhead chasing straight-line speed: it’s our version of America’s famous Bonneville salt flats. But on this blustery summer’s day the only power source is the wind. Ashby steps inside the sealed cockpit of Horonuku, and the craft crunches over the salt as he begins his run. Soon, he is streaking across this sea of hard white light at 225.58km/h, setting a new world record.
It sounds like an ending. Mission accomplished. A high note to bow out on, after retiring from his illustrious career as an America’s Cup sailor in 2021. But Ashby is already chasing new challenges: raising the wind-powered land speed record to 250km/h, and maybe more. Challenging the world record on water, too, with a top-secret and revolutionary craft that he reckons could hit 100 knots (185km/h) next year, smashing the current record of 65 knots.
John Bertrand, skipper of the 1983 America’s Cup winner Australia II, calls Ashby a “genius” for his design nous, which is all self-taught, and for his bold, innovative thinking. Ashby is bringing those qualities to bear now on projects in the commercial realm, too: he has a vision for transforming the maritime industry, making it less polluting by embracing new technologies in carbon fibre materials and hydrofoil design.
Make no mistake, after hanging up his sailor’s cap Glenn Ashby isn’t winding down. He’s just getting started.
Growing up, he always had an intense curiosity about how mechanical objects functioned. “My grandfather nicknamed me What ‘n’ Why because of all the questions I asked,” Ashby recalls with a chuckle. “I was always pulling things apart to see how they worked, then modifying them, trying to make them better.” His parents were keen sailors, and got Glenn and his two younger siblings into it too; family weekends were spent at regattas hosted by Bendigo Yacht Club on nearby Lake Eppalock. His first boat? An 8ft plywood dinghy that cost $150. There wasn’t much money in the family, but what they had by the bucket-load was a spirit of frugal, make-do ingenuity. “All of my equipment was really old – so I set about tuning it, trying all sorts of things to improve performance.” He would sand down the rudder and centreboard, alter the size and shape of the sails, modify his mast and battens. “Always tweaking and tuning,” he says. “Anything that might give me an edge in competitions.” Because even as a young kid, Glenn Ashby had an intense desire to win. And win he did.
He really should have gone to uni and studied engineering or physics. But he quit school in Year 11 to take up an apprenticeship with a local sailmaker, and not long afterwards, aged 18, won his first world title racing A-Class catamarans – foiling craft (meaning their hull lifts up out of the water at speed) that are sailed single-handed. He would go on to snag another 16 world titles, plus an Olympic silver medal at Beijing 2008 (the fact he missed out on gold still rankles) racing these and other similar boats.
And then there’s the America’s Cup, that glamorous, historic contest that occupies a special place in every elite sailor’s heart. “It’s the pinnacle of our sport,” he says. He was involved in four campaigns, first as coach for the winning BMW Oracle Racing team in 2010, and thereafter with Emirates Team New Zealand, as a wing trimmer in 2013, when they lost; as skipper in 2017, when they won; and as the mainsail trimmer in 2021, when they won again.
(Fun fact: a trimmer’s job on these boats is to control the power, by constantly adjusting the shape and camber of the sails. There’s plenty of telemetry involved, of course, but it’s also about feel. A good trimmer can feel, through the seat of their pants, how much power is required to keep the boat in “trim” – sailorspeak for perfectly balanced and operating at maximum efficiency.)
For Ashby, a large part of the appeal of these America’s Cup campaigns with Emirates Team New Zealand was the opportunity to bounce ideas around with its engineers, designers and marine architects. “The America’s Cup is, and always has been, a technology and innovation race,” he says. No matter that these blokes all had degrees and doctorates, and he’d left school in Year 11; he would bring them ideas nutted out on pieces of paper, or explain to them what he envisaged, and they would go off and do the modelling on computers, crunching the numbers. Ashby found, in this Kiwi team, a like-minded bunch of people: daring, innovative thinkers and doers.
So why, after his second America’s Cup win with them in 2021, did he decide to retire from sailing? “I’d had a good run but my gas tank was empty,” he says. “I wanted to recalibrate the balance of my life.” Stepping away would allow him to spend more time with his family – he and his wife Mel have two daughters, aged 15 and 12, and live in a sweet waterside township on the Mornington Peninsula – and also to focus on new challenges. Like the crazy dream he’d harboured since he was that seven-year-old kid on the skateboard: the dream to break wind-powered speed records. His old mates at Emirates Team New Zealand had the resources and the skills to help him realise that dream. So he put out the feelers to the Kiwis: were they up for the challenge? Of course they were.
It was back-of-the-napkin stuff at first: noneof them had any experience with building land yachts. “We didn’t know much about wheels, tyres or suspension,” Ashby says. “But we just took the bull by the horns. We did our research and we learned quickly.”
The record to beat – 202.9km/h – had been set in 2009 in America’s Mojave Desert by a Brit named Richard Jenkins in his land yacht Greenbird. That project took Jenkins 10 years; Ashby and the Kiwis, in contrast, had a timeline of only 10 months from conception to delivery of their craft. And then, of course, Ashby had to learn how to drive it; early tests were done on a runway in Auckland before Horonuku was shipped over the ditch.
The physics of the thing are astonishing. Its power-generating unit – that giant, rigid, 11m-tall carbon fibre “sail” – takes 1.7 tonnes of wind load. And Horonuku wasn’t designed simply to run downwind; it was designed to harness wind coming from the side, and to convert that force into forward speed. Hence the need for the outrigger, and a tremendous amount of ballast for traction, to prevent the craft from simply being blown sideways. “Our all-up weight was 2.6 tonnes, and 1.2 tonnes of that was lead blocks, distributed around the craft,” Ashby explains. “We had 900kg of lead in the outrigger pod alone. We needed all that weight for grip.”
He and the team were at Lake Gairdner on and off for five months in late 2022 and early 2023. It’s a remote place, 120km from the nearest town (Iron Knob, pop. 110). “All up, I spent about 40 days at the lake over the course of 14 trips, from scoping the place out to setting the new record,” Ashby says. When Horonuku arrived there – a huge logistical undertaking – the team found Mother Nature had thrown them a curveball: the ephemeral salt lake had a few centimetres of water in it. They had to wait weeks for it to evaporate, and even then there were soft, slushy patches; it certainly wasn’t the uniform, flawless salt crust they’d hoped for.
Still, by early December 2022, with dozens of runs in Horonuku under his belt, Ashby was feeling confident in his ability to take the craft up towards 200km/h. Inside the cockpit, with a steering wheel to control the front wheel, and foot pedals and a paddle-shift to control the sail’s angle of attack (which is to say, the power), he could feel Horonuku’s balance point, her sweet spot, her perfect trim. That sailor’s intuition, honed over decades of racing everything from single-handed catamarans to America’s Cup yachts, proved invaluable – especially at the pointy end, nudging 200km/h, “when you’re on an absolute knife-edge,” he says.
In video clips from the cockpit around this time, Ashby is always cool and calm, pilot-like, even though other video clips shot by the ground crew show Horonuku skittering on the salt surface like a jumpy racehorse, the outrigger pod occasionally lifting right off the ground before slamming back down. It looks, um, a bit sketchy, I venture. “It was pretty sketchy at times,” he laughs. “But a lot of that was because the salt surface wasn’t ideal. There were still slippery spots and wet patches – different textures that would alter the grip of the craft.”
On December 11 Ashby clocked 222.4km/h, a new world record. And after the celebrations had died down he found himself thinking, How much faster could I go? He knew Horonuku was capable of more, given the right conditions.
In February 2023, they were about to return to Lake Gairdner to pack up the craft and go home when the team’s meteorologist predicted a short window of perfect winds. The lake would be drier by then, too. Why not have one more crack? So that’s what they did, on February 24.
Ashby’s first 16 runs on that day were all over 200km/h. And then right on dusk, on his 17th and final run, the stars aligned. The wind suddenly picked up and he felt the great power of Horonuku flexing under him; he coaxed her into perfect trim, that knife-edge balance of opposing forces. He knew he was going to break the record again, 10 seconds before it happened. “It’s a surreal feeling,” he says. “Even though it’s super noisy and rough and bumpy, everything goes quiet and it’s like time slows down. You’re feeling the load on the craft through the seat of your pants, and watching the speedo climb. It’s like a super-heightened focus and awareness. You’re thinking, ‘This is the one… this is my moment’.”
Ashby rode that knife-edge to 225.58km/h on the 17th and final run of February 24, breaking his own world record set 10 weeks previously. And still he thought, How much faster could I possibly go?
Life’s interesting for Glenn Ashby these days. The46-year-old is enjoying spending time with Mel and the girls, sailing with them for fun, and looking after their herd of Angus heifers on their boutique cattle farm. He’s running his sailmaking business, and working on various tech ventures, including with Emirates Team New Zealand’s commercial arm, Design Works, developing new foiling technologies that he hopes will revolutionise the marine industry. “Traditional, heavy boats could all be replaced with lightweight, carbon fibre foiling boats that require 20 per cent of the energy,” he says. “It’s hugely more efficient than pushing a hull through the water and burning a whole lot of diesel. As it is, the world’s marine industry is a big polluter. I want to make a difference.”
Though retired from sailing in the America’s Cup, he’s still got a foothold in the competition. He’s coaching Orient Express Team France – one of five teams vying for the single challenger’s spot to go head-to-head against defending champions Emirates Team New Zealand at this year’s America’s Cup in Barcelona. (Surely that makes things a bit awkward between him and the Kiwi team, I say. Ashby laughs, apparently in agreement, before demurring and insisting that everyone’s being very professional about it). And he’s also helping to mentor an Australian squad of 17 young women and youth athletes, selected last year to spearhead Australia’s return to the America’s Cup in coming years.
As for his speed dreams, he’s hoping to return to Lake Gairdner later this year to push the record still further. “I’m aiming for 250km/h, and I won’t sleep until I’ve got it,” he says, only half joking. And in the meantime he and Emirates Team New Zealand are busy designing a boat to challenge the wind-powered water speed record (65.45 knots / 121km/h) set by fellow Aussie Paul Larsen in 2012. Construction of the boat will start later this year, with a tilt at the record scheduled for August or September next year. (Ashby and Larsen are actually old friends; they had lunch together a few weeks ago and Larsen wished him the best of luck.)
Two European teams also have Larsen’s record in their sights, so Ashby doesn’t want to give too much away. His boat will be a foiling craft, of course – but will it be powered by a kite, like the Europeans are using? “I can say the power source will be a wing [sail] very similar to what we used on the land speed project,” he says. So it’ll be fixed to the boat? “It won’t be fixed on to the boat itself, but it will be similar in concept,” he replies carefully. “It’s a very, very unique craft. It will be different, conceptually, to anything that has ever been done before. That’s basically all I can say.”
He’s targeting 100 knots (185km/h). “I’m setting the bar extremely high,” he acknowledges. “We’re pushing boundaries here that nobody has ever got into before with a sailing craft. Once you get up to 80, 90 knots you’re getting into areas like supercavitating foils and a lot of physics that have never been modelled before.
“I’m trying to push the engineers and design guys to places that they’re possibly not super-comfortable with at the moment. But if you don’t push hard, you don’t make it.”
How fast can Glenn Ashby possibly go? That’s an ending still waiting to be written.
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