Land-Speed Lust
With the engineering might of the America’s Cup defender, foiling ace Glen Ashby finally has the right stuff to take a crack at the land-speed sailing record.
This is a story about a lake and a boy who loved the lake and how, when the lake disappeared, the boy made do. And how that leads to something big.
The boy was Glenn Ashby, growing up in the interior of Australia. Lake Eppalock, built as a reservoir, was his playground each year until it was annually drained to satisfy thirsty crops. What’s a sailor boy to do? Build a landsailer, of course.
Quietly, Ashby grew up improving his rides, year by year, and harboring a dream, never daring to really count on a day when he would, no fooling, convince his teammates in the America’s Cup defenders camp, Emirates Team New Zealand, to focus their might, main, expertise and dollars on something not the America’s
Cup. While he was banging away in the garage, would mama Ashby ever have imagined an America’s Cup team designing and building a landsailer for her son to drive and attempt to beat 126.2 mph, the sailing speed record on land?
Think about it. The smalltown kid from a Jet Ski lake made himself into a multitime world champion in catamarans, an Olympic medalist, and a critical player in multiple America’s Cup victories. Then came downtime between matches for the Cup, and today you can get a self-conscious crackup out of Ashby by suggesting that everything to this point was all about maneuvering to get Team New Zealand right where he wanted them. It might even be a little bit true.
Ashby says: “I began at age 9 or 10, reusing broken masts and cut-down windsurfing sails. Building landsailers was a great way to learn about balance and grip, and then to see how much faster you could go on land than on water— fast enough to scare yourself, but going really fast in a windpowered craft is a childhood fascination that stayed with me. Before the last Cup, I began putting feelers out to see if the guys would be interested. They were. Fortunately, Grant Dalton is a speed freak who is always up for a challenge.”
So, late last summer, the most sophisticated landsailer ever built arrived ready for the salt surface of Lake Gairdner in South Australia. Horonuku— translated as “gliding swiftly over land”—represents all the engineering savvy Team New Zealand could muster, and we know that’s a far cry from repurposing broken masts and cut-down windsurfer sails. Their best computer models say the craft is capable of recordbreaking speeds. But having that potential is only step one.