Will Rosebud make the Sydney-Hobart startline?

Ray Roberts, pleased with his win in IRC Passage division one at Audi Hamilton Island Race Week with the Farr 42 Evolution Racing, is hoping that his next big challenge in Australian waters will be this year’s Rolex Sydney-Hobart race with the 2007 winner Rosebud.

Roberts’ Workforce Marine earlier this year bought the damaged STP 65 from her American owner Roger Sturgeon and an insurance company. Rosebud broke her mast and suffered some structural damage when she hit a big wave in last year’s Rolex Middle Sea Race.

New England Boat Works repaired the crack in the forward topsides. With a new mast and a mix of Americans experienced with the boat and Roberts’ Australian regular crew members, she raced under Roberts’ trademark name Evolution Racing to third place in Rolex IRC national championship during New York Yacht Club Race Week at Newport, Rhode Island, in July.

The boat is still in Newport.

“I’m 80 per cent sure we will ship the boat to Sydney in time for the Rolex Sydney-Hobart race,” says Roberts. “At the moment I have a busy work schedule and if my work interferes, it won’t come until next year.”

The Hobart race crew would include three or four of the US crewmen with experience on the boat including Malcolm Park, who managed Sturgeon’s Sydney-Hobart campaign in 2007 and a hydraulics expert.

“The hydraulics on the boat are quite complicated,” says Roberts.

In the Newport regatta, he found the boat to be extremely fast in light air. “I was amazed at its light air performance. And in the one heavy-air race, when the wind was over 20 knots, it was pretty good.”

For Hamilton Island Race Week this year Roberts chartered the Farr 42 Spirit of Lexus from South Australian boatbuilder Michael Keough of Austral Yachts.

Keough raced the boat when she was new at the Hamilton Island regatta in 2008 to finish second in IRC premier passage division. He asked Roberts to campaign her with his experienced team in this year’s regatta because he felt the boat had more potential than it had previously shown.

With Roberts steering, Jamie MacPhail on tactics and Richard Hudson navigating, Evolution Racing comfortably won IRC passage division one with an impressive 2-1-1-2-3-1-5 scoreline. “We developed some new membrane sails from Evolution and got it to perform,” said Roberts.

The new membrane mainsail and headsail were designed by Ben De Coster at Evolution Sails in Sydney. The membrane was constructed by Sailtorque, which works in collaboration with Evolution Sails on a range of products.

Pleased owner of the Farr 42, Michael Keough, said: “We got the rating down. A couple of new sails and very experienced crew make all the difference.

“The potential was always there; it was just a matter of it coming together.”

Roberts is returning to this year’s Asian Circuit, beginning with the China Coast Regatta in Hong Kong in October, with the TP52 Evolution Racing.

--Bob Ross