Volvo Ocean Race – The Future – Drones, OBR’s and more boats?

by Rob Kothe on 30 Sep 2015 Knut Frostad is moving from the pivotal CEO role to that of a consultant at the end of 2015. Sail-World interviewed him a few weeks ago and have so far published two parts of the extended interview with the CEO of eight years.

In Part One, Knut told us why he was not heading for another major event program, after rumours he was heading for the America’s Cup. In Part Two he told us just of the high and low points of his time with the race.

Now to Part three…

‘The important thing is to not lose time. I am not in caretaker mode, my ambition is to deliver an incredibly good platform for whoever comes after me.

‘A lot of those decisions will be made before the end of the year, when it comes to what changes we are going to make to the boat. But there are other decisions that will naturally be left for the new person to take. Communications will be a typical example of something that should wait anyway because of the speed with which technology is moving.

‘But we have plenty to do. We are right now working flat out with negotiations with potential (stopover) cities.

‘We are working with the teams that did the last race, and obviously the potential new teams. We have a long list of teams we're supporting on a daily basis.

‘We have already made some major decisions. About half of the route is already confirmed. Alicante to Cape Town is confirmed. Auckland is confirmed. And Lisbon and Cardiff, a new stop in the UK has already been announced and Gothenburg is confirmed.

What has proven a key element of the recent success of the race has been reduced costs and improved content coming from the boats. Sail-World asked Knut about this.

He explained ‘After the success of the Boat Yard, which has delivered major benefits, we will bring the teams closer to us, almost like a franchised model, where they have a license to participate.

‘And with that license comes a lot of other - such as the ownership of the Boat Yard and the boats and all the infrastructure around the boats. Being part of some of the decisions related to the race. They have a vote, and that's a program that is starting now in November.

‘For improved race coverage satellite communication is essential, so we are working very closely now with Inmarsat on the future. But the world of communications is changing so fast, so you always got to be careful about drawing all the details too early.

‘When I put together a list of major pluses from the last 8 years, I think that the on-board reporter program is one of those.

‘We had a vision with it in the beginning, and then at the first race I managed, was the first race we had them. Then we called them “media crew members.'

‘And there was a lot of resistance to this program, just as there was a lot of resistance to going one design.

‘I always say that when you make a change, if no one reacts to it, it’s probably not a good decision, because you are not actually changing anything.

‘And this one was ground breaking to get an outside person who was given to the team that is racing so closely together for nine months.

‘And who is not allowed to race, and is just going to be there to annoy you - annoying the sailors was kind of the first reactions I had.

‘And it wasn't easy in the beginning.

‘When you introduce a new program if you don't succeed 100%, you get all these guys who said, 'I told you so, I told you so.' It's not going to work. And in the first race, we did it, I must admit we probably only had 50% success.

‘We had some really great on-board reporters. The likes of Rick Deppe for example on Puma.

‘But we have other boats where we hardly had any good content.

‘And then the sailors came back to me, saying things like “Oh look at this. It's the same pictures we took ourselves four races ago.'

‘But we have persevered and the quality of images and reporting have improved remarkably.

‘During the 2014-15 race, I would go into race control in the morning, and just sit there and look at the pictures that had arrived overnight. And I was just going, 'Wow, look at this and look at this - and look at that one. Wow.'

‘We have just completed the work actually on the Book for this edition. We decided that instead of a book that has a lot of words that tell a long, long story about what happened in the race - we're just going to do an amazing photo book.

That contrast with the 2008 book we had to look hard to find good pictures. In fact most of the pictures in the early books were taken from the outside, they weren't taken from on-board and they were taken from professional photographers like Carlo Borhenghi and the others, because the quality we had from on-board was not really on the same level.

‘You still obviously need the outside photographers, because the helicopter photos are still amazing.

‘But this time we had heated arguments internally with the designers “Why can't you include that picture? Why can't we have this picture?' And they said, 'Well how many hundred pages is this book going to be?' It was because we had an abundance of amazing photo material. And that, for me, it's a fantastic step.

‘If you look at sports going forward, I think sport sponsorship is going to be less and less about logos, and more and more about content.

‘And that's why sailing, I think, has a bright future. Because in sailing you can take amazing photos and videos. Because of the colours, the different lights, the fact that you're out in open ocean and the world can think, 'You have amazing photographs.' And the water, and all the different things that happens in around the world yacht race.

‘Because it's not only sailing around a mark. Like you, one minute there's a storm, one minute there's pitch black dark and lightening. The other day you have waves, you have got the action, and then there are the crew on board. They're tired, they're woken up… It's interesting.

‘I remember the first race I did as a CEO. I wanted to show how tired the sailors are.

‘Because I had been in there, and I just always remember the scenes on board. Where we're going two days without sleep, in a nightmare with storms somewhere in the Southern Ocean. And you look around, and all the guys have sort of red eyes, and they have wrinkled faces. They have - you can just see that - the whole nature is captured, the face.

‘This time we had a category of pictures we just called 'Tired and we have so many fantastic shots.

‘Probably one of the best is of Ian Walker’s face in one of the toughest legs, where he just looks up in the camera. You can see that he hasn't slept forever. And there's so many fantastic images in that.

‘So no, I think the content of the race is its’ asset. We can do a lot more - we can do a lot more with it.

‘Technology going forward is going to make a big difference, I will be extremely surprised if there's not a drone on every single boat at the next race. Our technology team is working already with specialist drone manufacturers so we identify what are the challenges with running drones from these boats, and what are the opportunities?

‘We started testing that in the last race. Dongfeng was a leader with this.

‘Vision Quality is great and they are getting faster, more reliable, much more controllable.

‘We have experimented with GPS control drones. You can actually tell a drone to sit behind the boat in a certain place. Like 10 meters behind the boat and 20 meters up to 5 degrees starboard. And the drone will go and sit there and follow the boat in that location, just sitting there.

‘And they can send the drone on a specific pre-programmed path there on the boat.

‘The biggest challenge we have with drones is landing them. Landing them, and obviously the speed is also a challenge when you are in windy conditions.

‘It’s not just pure boat speed, but also the current wind, and the close to the surface in big waves is quite variable pressure. Because the wind that is around the main sail and the big sails is very different to what wind direction the drone has when it's coming into the boat.

‘So landing them has been one of the biggest challenges, with lots of crashes. Crashes on the deck or in the water.

‘But I'm confident that with the development of battery power and technology, that we will see some amazing development of that.

‘All in all, we did get a great lift I think with the on-board reporters in the last race, and the quality of the content they produced for the boats. And we also had a good debrief with them, and we are trying to start an OBR program - that had been decided much earlier.

‘So we start training and testing equipment next year and actually see how we can improve the areas of the on-board reporting from the last race.

‘And that's a big decision, because in the past, the on-board reporter programs have really started when the teams have started sailing. Which nowadays can be quite late, this time that wasn't before spring of - spring summer on the race.

‘And if we, now that we have a fleet of boats existing, we can actually do things with these boats way earlier. And then we can train new OBR's, we can test the work flows, we can explore different ways of covering the story and telling the story and reporting the story. That is going to be exciting.’

In summary under Knut Frostad's guidance, the Volvo Ocean Race has dramatically reduced the cost of entry, while making it significantly easier for shorter campaigns and at the same time is driving better and better sponsorship value, as it creates better coverage opportunities.

If all goes to plan, there could be 10 boats on the Alicante start line for the next race and the event coverage will continue to improve.

So it seems, going forward, world-wide audience’s will almost have to put on their sea boots and wet weather gear to watch the race on their waterproof mobile phones.

In the final interview segment – Knut Frostad talks about the future of the race, monos or multis, the marine environment and more.

If you've not read Parts I & II of this series follow the links below.