Britton Chance Jr.

A resident of Lyme, Connecticut, Chance died from a stroke at the age of 72 in Branford, Connecticut, in 2012. He had one daughter, Tamsin.

However, this victory was short-lived; a few months later a New Zealand team issued a challenge with their 90-foot yacht KZ 1. Chance was again called upon to aid in the design of the defender. Headed by Chance, the American design team of Chance, Dave Hubbard, Duncan MacLane, John Marshall, Gino Morrelli, Bruce Nelson and Bernard Nivelt did not have enough time to create a monohull to match the challenger; instead they designed a catamaran, dubbed Stars & Stripes (US 1). Dennis Conner sailed this catamaran and retained the title in 1988 America's Cup.

In 1984, he designed a new racing sloop for the new IOR One Ton category. He created the new boat from his previous designs for Vineta and Alethea I, and Alethea II. Chance said, "The combination of leading dimensions, rig, and stability chosen cannot be attained without state-of-the-art Kevlar/carbon epoxy composite or Unidirectional S-glass sandwich layups, so the design concept has only recently become possible."

In the mid-1980s, American yachtsman Dennis Conner asked Chance to be part of his design team for the Sail America Foundation of the San Diego Yacht Club. Chance used the Cray X-MP/48 super computer to create his design. He also consulted with scientists at Boeing, Grumman, and NASA to achieve the best results. Along with Bruce Nelson and David Pedrick, Chance brought three new designs to the team—the third, Stars & Stripes 87, won the 1987 America's Cup for the United States. Chance noted that pressure to win back the title for the United States was high; approximately 30 yachts were designed for the 1987 America's Cup with a combined cost of $100 million. He said, "This race to win the Cup was largely a contest of designers and technologies". President Ronald Reagan said, "The skill and determination of the Stars & Stripes team captured the imagination of the American people. They demonstrated the traits that have long characterized this country at its best—optimism, dedication, teamwork, and an eagerness to master the most advanced technology and put it to good use."

For the American's Cup trials in 1977, Chance would again redesign the Intrepid. However, Ted Turner returned, winning both the trials and the 1977 America's Cup as the captain of the Courageous.

By 1974, he designed the swift ocean racers Equation and Ondine. That provided experience for Mariner, a new contender for the 1974 America's Cup with Ted Turner at the helm. Turner was an able captain, having been named US Yachtsman of the year two times. Chance "gave Mariner a radical shape behind the keel, a configuration of abrupt, startling angles." To perfect his design, he tested five-foot models in the tanks at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey, for $1,200 a day, until he "had achieved a phenomenal hull". The Mariner's syndicate gave the ship to the United States Merchant Marine Academy, avoiding earlier financial problems by making contributions tax-deductible.

Because of last-minute alterations, the Mariner went into the final trials with virtually no testing. She unsuccessfully competed for a spot in America's Cup. Stephen's Courageous won both the trial and the 1974 America's Cup.

On September 28, 1974, Chance married Dena Lynn Reichel in Huntington, Long Island. The couple met during the Newport to Bermuda race in the spring of 1974 when Dena was a cook on the Equation, a yacht designed by Chance. This was his second marriage, as his first marriage ended in divorce. They spent their honeymoon participating in the Middle Sea Race which followed Ulysses' route in the Mediterranean. This married also ended in divorce.

On April 22, 1971, Chance presented a paper, "Yacht Design: The State of the Art", to the American Philosophical Society. He spoke of the America's Cup and the "progress concerning ...the boundary layer, separation, and wave resistant theories in order to be able to predict analytically and to minimize, resistance without heel and sideforce". He noted, "This problem is most complex, however, and remains one of the most challenging problems in hydrodynamics and applied mathematics."

In 1970, his father told Sports Illustrated, "He was a good skipper, but basically, he always wanted to know why the boat was going fast or slow and what he could do to make her go faster. He's been that way from the beginning."

By the late 1970s, he was also president of Chance Marine of Wilmette, Illinois. By 1985, he relocated Chance & Company to Essex, Connecticut.

In January 1970, French industrialist Baron Marcel Bich hired Chance to develop a twelve-meter "trial horse" for a French team from Yacht Club d'Hyeres, which was preparing to challenge the Intrepid, the 1967 America's Cup winner. With access to Bich's fortune from Bic pens, Chance noted, "Economic limitations were imposed only by the cost-effectiveness studies that we made." Chance's design was built by Hermann Eggerin in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, starting in June 1970. Yet, he still called upon former associates in the United States—Ted Hood and Lowell North made the sails, Bob Derecktor in Mamaroneck made the mast, and Barient of California fabricated special winches. His engineering and use of new metals reduced weight. Another of his innovations for the French was to make the test yacht smaller so that it could be operated by a crew of ten, instead of the usual eleven. He also placed the helmsman more forward. When it was completed in August 1970, Bich chose the name Chancegger as a combination of the surnames of designer and maker. Louis Noverraz, a European racing skipper said, "Chancegger is fast—very fast—and very sensitive on the helm." However, the Chancegger could only be used to test innovations; the rules of America's Cup say, "The competing yacht and its components must originate in the country making the challenge."

In June 1970, Time magazine noted, "Intrepid should probably be rechristened Son of Intrepid. Designer Britton Chance Jr., 29, has altered the 1967 cup winner so much that it is virtually a new boat." A rival designer said Chance "performed a hysterectomy on her keel". To everyone's surprise, except maybe Chance, the redesigned Intrepid beat the Valiant, the "early favorite", in America's Cup trials in August 1970. The Valiant was designed by Olin J. Stephens II, "the man who practically invented the 12-meter sloop" and had designed three America's Cup winners. The Intrepid also won the 1970 America's Cup.

Chance was "one the biggest innovators" of racing crafts during the 1970s and 1980s. He created a retractable keel that reduced the drag on a boat. He also experimented with polymers, "improving the laminar flow along the bottom of the boat". He applied lifting-surface theories and slender body theories with "remarkable correlation with tank results". He worked with the Harken brothers and others to design the ultra-light hull of the Amoco Procyon in 1991. This futuristic boat modernized sailboats and revitalized a slumping industry. With the Intrepid, he applied materials new to the industry, reducing weight for those elements by as much as fifty percent.

In 1969, Chance designed an America's Cup sailboat for yachtsman Ted Turner of Atlanta. However, that yacht was not built because its construction cost of $1 million was more than Turner's syndicate could afford.

Some of his most successful boats were Boo, Ondine IV, Resolute Salmon, and Uhuru. Chance also designed production boats such as the PT-30-1 Plas Trend 30-1 (1968), PT-30-2 Plas Trend 30-2 (1970), Chance 30/30 Allied (1971), the Chance 37 Wauquiez (1971), the Chance 32/28 Paceship (1972), the Chance 32 (1972), the PT-32 Plas Trend 32 (1973), the Chance 24 (1973), the Chance 29/25 Paceship (1973), Joemarin 29 (1974), Offshore 1 Change (1976), the Golden Wave 48 (1981), Tartan Pride 270 (1985), and the Essex 14 (1986).

In addition to winning the Olympics in 1968 and America's Cup in 1970, 1987, and 1988, his sailboats won the 5.5 Meter World Championship in 1967, 1969, 1971, 1984, 1985, and 1987; as well as the 5.5 Meter Gold Cup 1969 through 1971 and in 1984. His one-tonners won the 1971 New York Yacht Club Astor Cup, the 1973 New York Yacht Club Una Cup, and the 1976 One Ton Cup.

In 1968, Chance began using computers to predict velocity and simulate hull performance. He reduced the time to produce a boat by as much as a month by working on a Tandy 2000 computer with yacht design software. He collaborated with Apple to develop CAD Naval Design software (MacSurf, now MAXSURF). This software could define the hull surface mathematically which saved hours on calculations.

In August 1967, Chance took the Conqueror to Travemunde. There, he won three races with the Shillalah II winning ten. This time, the Soling was selected as the new standard for the 3MKB. Etchells "thought it was hardly coincidental that neither his boat nor Britton Chance's had been mentioned, even though they had won all of the races for two years running."

However, after the preliminary trials, Time magazine called Mariner an "iffy proposition" against Olin Stephens' Courageous and Intrepid, the latter essentially restored her to her 1967 lines by Stephens. Chance reluctantly agreed, pulling Mariner from the water to rebuild her hull. One reporter noted that Mariner syndicate members grumbled, while Chance sulked over this setback. The reporter wrote, "Naval architecture is not an exact science, alas. A whiz on the drawing board or in the testing tank may turn out to be a dog afloat."

In 1965, he was the captain of the Composition that won a race at the 5.5 Meter Class World Championship help in the Bay of Naples. In 1966, he also won a race the 5.5 Meter Class World Championship in Denmark, sailing the Chance.

In 1965, Chance brought his new boat, Conqueror, to the IYRU's 3-Man-Keelboat (3MKB) trials in Kiel, Germany. Chance and Olympian George O'Day sailed the Conqueror, winning three of eleven races. The other eight races were won by the Shillalah, designed by Skip Etchells. Except for the Conqueror and the Shillalah, Etchells said, "None of the other boats factored in the racing." However, the IYRU Committee did not select a winner and called for additional trails, scheduled for Travemunde, Germany.

He designed State-6 and Charade which placed first and third, respectively, at the first race of the 5.5 Meter Class Olympic trials in 1964. Canada used one of his 5.5-meter class designs for the 1964 Summer Olympics. In 1968, twelve of the seventeen entries in the 5.5 Meter Class US Olympic Trials were his designs. The United States used one of his designs for the 1968 Summer Olympics. His innovative 5.5-meter designs won gold and silver medals in the 1968 Olympics.

In 1962, he was a crewman on the Easterner, a contender for America's Cup from the New York Yacht Club. That same year, he was part of the syndicate backing the Columbia as a contender in America's Cup trials.

In the summer of 1962, he was a crewman on the Columbia, preparing for the Olympic trials. In September 1962, he won first place twice in the Olympic trials for the 5.5-meter class. However, he did not make the team. In 1964, he came in second place overall in the 5.5 Meter Class Olympic trials while sailing a ship that he designed. He selected as an alternate helmsman for the 1964 Summer Olympics for the Dragon Class and 5.5 Meter Class.

However, he was mostly self-taught in naval architecture. In 1962, he opened Chance & Company in Oyster Bay, Long Island, above a Goodyear Tire Store. His naval architectural firm designed craft in a wide range of sizes, from racing shells to America's Cup competitors. He also designed rowing skulls and 5.5-meter class sailboats that raced in the Olympics. Most of his yachts were built at the shipyard in Mamaronek, New York.

In 1962, he received his first commissioned design for a 5.5-meter sailboat. Next, he designed a 40-foot trimaran that had a hydraulically activated roller-furling/reefing gear, a rotating mast, and hulls made of epoxy resins, using unidirectional materials that were very advanced for that time. In 1964, the New York Yacht Club selected Chance to receive funds, organization, and testing through a new program "to ease the burden especially of young and promising designers".

Chance competed in both the America's Cup trials and the Olympic trials. In 1960, he participated in the 5.5-meter class Olympic trials with the ship Complex III and teammates Ed O'Malley and Runnie Colie who was the captain. They "narrowly missed Olympic nomination".

During the summers while in college, Chance worked at towing tank or ship model basin the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey. In the fall of 1960, he left college to apprentice as a draftsman with the boat designer C. Raymond Hunt and Fenwick Williams in Tilton, New Hampshire. In the spring of 1961, he apprenticed with Ted Hood, a boatbuilder, designer, and yachtsman located in Marblehead, Massachusetts. Hood had him working as a rigger, and also learning about sails and sail making. While with Hood, Chance supervised the towing tank tests on the Nefertiti, a 12-meter yacht created for the 1962 America's Cup. The test were conducted at the Stevens Institute. Chance is credited as both designer and assistant for the Nefetiti's America's Cup trials.

In 1955, he started sailing in International 5.5 Meter competitions. In 1956, he came in second place in the East Coast Championship Penguin Regatta, junior division. In July 1957, he competed at the Barnegat Bay Yacht Race Association's Championship Regatta, winning the Atkinson Cup for his first-place finish with Complex II in the E Sloop class; he also came in first place in the Penguin class with Small Chance. Also in 1957, he won the South River Yacht Club Regatta.

Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Chance was the son of Jane Earle and Dr. Britton Chance, a biophysicist at the University of Pennsylvania who won a gold medal in sailing at the 1952 Summer Olympics. Raised in Mantoloking, New Jersey, he frequently sailed in Barnegat Bay and developed an early interest making boats that could go faster. Chance said, "I started racing and sailing at Manotoloking on my own by the time I was eight. My first boat was a Barnegat Bay Sneakbox—then I had a duckbox, Moth, and another sneakbox, penguins, and finally Class E scows."

Britton Chance Jr. or Britt Chance (June 12, 1940 – October 12, 2012) was an American naval architect who developed core elements of three yachts that won the America's Cup and won the World Championship six times. The New York Times said he "was known for having a mathematician's precision and a renegade's willingness to experiment". Professional Boatbuilder called him "one of the brightest minds in yacht design".