“There’s a lot of bullshit luck involved with the Laser,
you know,” Kirby says, sitting at his dining room table, a
half hull of the Laser between us. “It came out right. I look
at it now and I think, I wouldn’t change a damn thing in the
shape. I’d just leave it alone. If somebody said, ‘Redo it,’ I’d
say, ‘Go to hell.’ We hit it right in the first place.”
Kirby’s decision to license the design rather than build
it himself was for a long time a boon to both him and the
class. Lasers could be made all over the world, and Kirby
could keep designing new boats without the hassle of over-
seeing production. But the most recent company to make
the Laser in America ended up in a legal tangle with him
over royalties. The resulting litigation has been a source of
frustration to Laser fans for years. At present, new Ameri-
can Lasers come from Australia, England, or Japan. There
would seem to be an opening for a “Laser killer.”
A freshly imagined car-topper might take advantage
of new materials such as carbon fiber. “In the past, to
make sure a structure didn’t fail, you just threw more
material at it,” says Rick Royce, a professor of naval ar-
chitecture at the Webb Institute on Long Island. But new
computer- modeling techniques allow designers to slim
everything, in crafts of all sizes. “Everywhere you look,
weight is coming off.”
But more than engineering
makes a perfect boat. It takes
a confluence of need, design,
and timing. The lesson applies
to all modes of transportation
at this moment of technological
transition. Are we content with
driverless cars as the new horse-
less carriage? Or will we imagine
a different matrix of mobility?
What catches on isn’t always the
fastest or the most advanced, but
something that combines sophis-
tication of function with ease of
manufacturing and broad appeal.
That’s why, a half-century on,
there are still tens of thousands of
Lasers all over the world.
The boat that replaces the
Laser will have to be something
different. “If you’re doing close to
the same thing, you might as well
do the same thing,” says Dave
Clark, the 27-year-old founder of
boatbuilding company Fulcrum
Speedworks. “It’s only if you
fundamentally reconsider the
recreational activity itself, and
completely modify it, will you
actually make a dent.”
Clark makes a singlehanded
“foiler”—a hydrofoil sailing dinghy—that flies out of the
water on a small wing. Free from the drag of the water,
the UFO, as it’s called, is wildly fast. Its hull is a simple
fiberglass catamaran, but the two T-shaped foils require
a system of struts and wands to control their flight. The
boats are clickbait on YouTube, flying above the water
like herons. But they’re ungainly at rest. The learning
curve is steep, and the sailing status quo is hard to shift.
For now, UFOs remain a novelty, with just some small,
local fleets to race—though who wouldn’t want their
boat to attain Laser levels of success? Ironically, Clark’s
biggest challenge is stasis: He can’t change his creation
if he hopes for it to attain mega-class status one day. You
can’t sell a thousand boats and then inform your custom-
ers they are no longer competitive. You get one shot.
Which makes the Laser’s persistence all the more re-
markable. An original buyer could easily be teaching their
grandchild to sail. MacLeod mulls racing in the Masters
competition. “You know, I still have a Laser,” he says.
Kirby is too frail to sail, but he thinks about it constantly.
“The Laser Worlds is going on in Ireland, and there are
hundreds of boats,” he says, looking at the model. “There’s
so goddamn many of them. Everywhere.” CLOCKWISEFROMTOP^ LEFT:^PAULGILHAM/GETTYIMAGES;^ COURTESY^ BRUCEKIRBY^ (2 )54 SPRING 2019 • POPSCI.COM
Racing the Wind
(1) The women’s
Laser Radial
class at the
2016 Olympics;
(2) Kirby’s
first Laser
sketch; (3)
Kirby circa
1959, sailing
the MK.1
International
14 dinghy, the
first boat he
ever designed.12
3