SpeedDream profile - Vlad Murnikov - Lead designer.

A good designer always likes to get their hands dirty. Here Vlad Murnikov,
sandpaper in hand, works lovingly on his creation.

It’s amazing what can develop from a single, powerful thought. Such is the SpeedDream story. After years away from designing boats, Vlad Murnikov had found a comfortable niche designing high-end houses. “It was a great job and I made a good living,” Vlad said, “but in the back of my mind I always knew that I would return to boats. I had some good ideas; and some unfinished business.” 

Murnikov was the lead designer behind Fazisi, the first, and by happenstance only entry from the Soviet Union to participate in the grueling Whitbread Round the World Race. It was an innovative, ambitious – many said impossible – project, but through hard work and deep commitment the boat was finally built and launched. The rest is history. 

By the time Fazisi had completed its lap of the planet, the Soviet Union had collapsed. There was no point going back home and Murnikov and his wife and young son immigrated to the United States. Vlad wrote a book about his experiences with Fazisi, a wonderful tale of Iron Curtain politics, new money and western sponsorship say nothing of a rag tag bunch of sailors building their own boat to race around the world. 

The futuristic lines of Fazisi, the yacht that turned heads at the start of the '89 Whitbread
Round the World race with a Soviet Union flag off the stern.

Vlad set up shop in Fall River, Massachusetts and the new design he came up with was the mxRay, a sporty single-handed skiff, first ever to fly an asymmetrical spinnaker. “I took the idea to some established companies and they all said it couldn’t be done, that it was too much for one person to handle,” Murnikov smiled. “So I had to do it myself to prove them wrong and now they are all doing what they once said was impossible. Just goes to show, doesn’t it?” 

For Vlad it was an important lesson. Powerful ideas often meet powerful opposition; it’s just a fact of life, one that if you wish to be successful you have to overcome. The mxRay was by any measure a resounding success. His small start-up, M-yachts built and sold over 300 boats in the three years, but as the company grew so did the difficult balance between creativity and running a business. “In the end the stress of managing the company took away much of the fun and when one of my dealers came up with the proposal to buy me out and build MX-Ray under the license I was happy. Unfortunately he stopped building boats soon thereafter and I went off in search of something different. I always knew that I would return and when I did it would be with a project more ambitious than any previous.” 

It was in 2010 that the time was finally right to chuck in the bill-paying job and pursue the dream of building the world’s fastest monohull. It was an extremely ambitious idea, but, hopefully, an achievable one. The real push for records and the new innovations had, for the past decade, been confined to multihulls. They were faster than monohulls and if an outright speed record was your target then a multihull was your ride. That left the monohulls lagging and to Vlad’s critical eye he saw massive room for improvement. 

“If you look at SpeedDream it looks like quite a radical boat, totally out of this world,” Murnikov said. “But all I have done is taken some proven concepts and pushed their boundaries further. Look at our Flying Keel. Canting keels have been around for over a decade and are clearly a successful concept, but the amount to which they can cant has been limited by rules and hull design. I threw out both and came up with a keel that can cant all the way to 80+ degrees. Heel the boat more than 10-degrees and voila, the keel flies.” All in all SpeedDream is a revolutionary concept, but each of its aspects is an evolution of a solid and proven engineering solution. 

It’s this kind of bold initiative tempered with innovative engineering and hydro and fluid dynamics that has computer models predicting that the boat will reach sustained speeds in the 40 knot range making a 24-hour run of 900, perhaps even 1,000 nautical miles a distinct possibility. For Vlad it’s all about increasing efficiency rather than adding power. It’s all about thinking well outside the box while keeping at least one foot well grounded. “There is no need to reinvent everything,” Vlad says with a smile. “There is, however, the need to think hard about where improvements can be made.” That, we believe, is the power of a powerful thought.

The SpeedDream prototype showing the innovative Flying Keel