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ABSOLUTE LUXURY
The spiral staircase to flybridge and dinette are forward and across from the
open galley. The galley is down three steps but not out of the yachts social
environment.
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INTERIOR
The master stateroom is starboard and has a corner walk-around queen berth with
drawer storage beneath, hanging cedar lined locker, built-in dresser, full width
mirror and over head lights.
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"CHAMPION" is based in Fort Lauderdale and selling for $1,299,000 |
MICHAEL HARRIS
Michael Harris is on standby waiting for your inquiry. Michael is a qualified skipper and
can fill you in on the handling capabilities of this luxury sports cruiser. He has been
sailing since 1975.
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DID YOU KNOW?
Gil de Ferran is a qualified mechanical engineer and first arrived in London on a whim as a 21-year old engineering student.
Gil credits his dad with teaching him the workings of every aspect of a car.
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JACKIE STEWART
Sir Jackie Stewart played a big role in persuading Gil to take racing seriously and to finally consider the United
States cart circuit as a forum for his new career. In 1995, he took CART's Rookie of the Year.
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Image Courtesy of Gil De Ferran's official website: www.gildeferran.com.br
Born: France Nov 11th 1967 Hometown; Sao Paulo, Brazil
Resides: Ft.
Lauderdale
Wife: Angela. Kids;Anna and Luke
web site: www.gildeferran.com.br
2003 Indianapolis 500 winner
2003 IRL runner-up 2002 IRL 3rd Two time CART Champion, 2000 and
2001 2001 Indianapolis 500 runner -up 1995 CART rookie of the year
1992 British Formula 3 champion
JACKIE STEWART TAKES NOTICE OF DE FERRAN...
It was little more than a decade ago that Gil de Ferran was walking out the
front door of a brownstone on the River Thames, thinking he was on his way
to joining racing's royalty. He'd come to London from São Paulo on a lark --
a brainy 21-year-old engineering student looking to earn a few credits in
Formula Racing 101, and willing to share a two-bedroom apartment with six
other guys.
But when open-wheel legend Sir Jackie Stewart took notice of the young
Brazilian's skills, a whole new world opened before him. Stewart admired de
Ferran's educated air and effortless élan, so he sent Gil to the finest
speech coaches and tailors in London. De Ferran's quiet charm, which
approaches cockiness but never quite gets there, made him a perfect
complement to Stewart's other racer, dashing Scotsman David Coulthard.
Stewart bred them to fit into a world of lords and ladies, supermodels and
Lloyds of London policies. But de Ferran stayed off the fast track of London
society and concentrated on his career track. In 1992, he won the F3 series,
racing's equivalent of Star Search, and proposed marriage to a publishing
heiress. They made plans to raise a family in the city, hopefully on the
better salary of an F1 test driver. But the opportunities failed to
materialize. When de Ferran's wife, Angela, became pregnant, Sir Jackie
nudged Gil to look toward America and CART. De Ferran didn't know much about
the US. Then again, he hadn't known much about the UK when he left Brazil.
At least now he spoke English.
Despite blazing to CART's Rookie of the Year honors in 1995, de Ferran found
himself strangely adrift in America. The well-bred politeness and
velvet-rope reserve that served him so well in Europe backfired here. Two
charismatic future F1 racers, Alex Zanardi and Juan Montoya, were dominating
the US open-wheel scene. And when it came to Brazilians, fans preferred the
accessibly glamorous Christian Fittipaldi. De Ferran remained a mystery to
the public, just another handsome racer. But then Roger Penske showed the
same faith as Sir Jackie, and hired de Ferran to pilot a car for the most
famous team in American open-wheel racing.
De Ferran won the 2000 CART championship for Penske and was on his way to a
second straight title when he returned to England for the inaugural
Rockingham 500. He and Kenny Brack clearly had the fastest cars and had been
trading the lead all day. Brack looked like he'd stolen the race for good on
the white flag lap. But gathering speed around the final circuit, de Ferran
wailed high through Turn 3, inches from Brack's wheels, and stole it back to
show F1 what it was missing.
De Ferran was on top of the world as he clinched the 2001 CART title a month
later in Australia. Only three drivers -- Zanardi, Rick Mears and Bobby
Rahal -- had pulled off successive championships, and de Ferran would be
favored to become the first to win three in a row. But flying home on the
team's private jet, his boss gave him something more to think about.
Penske's sponsors were unhappy CART was expanding into Europe. Roger Penske
was moving his operation to the IRL, CART's rival league. He gave Gil the
choice of staying with the team or going his own way in CART.
Life would certainly be different in the IRL, an all-oval series that raced
through good-ol'-boy towns in Texas, Tennessee and Kentucky. Staring out the
Learjet's windows, de Ferran flashed back to a race from a decade ago, a
kind of audition before F1's talent scouts. Midway through the event, his
throttle had stuck, and as he sat in the pit, watching the seconds tick, he
barked at his team to hurry. The stern voice of Sir Jackie came over the
radio: "Either we can't fix this, in which case there's not a damn thing you
can do. Or we can, in which case you better damn well keep your head."
The advice still works, de Ferran thought. There wasn't a damn thing he
could do about this war, so he might as well keep his head until it got
settled. At that, the defending champion of CART told his billionaire boss,
"I'm with you."
Team Penske arrived in the IRL with two teams, five dozen spit-and-polish
crewmen and the promise of a new era. As owner/driver Eddie Cheever Jr.
says, "It really improves the DNA of your league when you say you're racing
against Penske." The orange-and-white cars cast such a shadow that when IRL
champ Sam Hornish Jr. was in the lead during the season's first race in
Miami, his spotters merely told him, "They're behind you." There was no need
to name de Ferran and his teammate, Helio Castroneves. "Everyone said I was
a fluke," says Hornish. "It helps to have competition that everyone
respects."
Respect is one thing, admiration is another. No one was quite sure how the
Penske drivers would fit in with the IRL's nuts-and-bolts racers. But as the
season progresses, the league's drivers are finding that de Ferran isn't
really all that different from them. "You know," he says, "I grew up as a
street kid."
The November-to-March Brazilian summers get triple-digit hot, and young Gil
spent them on the sidewalks of São Paolo. Only a city kid would know how to
make use of empty booze bottles left by drunks. Gil crushed them underfoot,
carefully mixing the shards with glue and then smearing them on his kite
strings. To anyone who walked by, he must have looked perfectly innocent
watching his kite make lazy loops and dives. But the circles he flew were
really kamikaze missions, intended to dice his friends' kites into ribbons.
When he got bored with that, he'd pull weeds out of cracks in the cement and
make slingshots, using fruit seeds as high-speed pellets. Every so often,
when he was really bored, Gil would jump off the roof of his house for fun.
"Someone was always ending up in the hospital every day," he says,
chuckling.
One day, Gil's father, Luc, a soft-spoken but stern Ford engineer, brought
home a tiny orange go-kart for his 6-year-old son. He wheeled it to an empty
parking lot and drew straight chalk lines in the asphalt. Then he jogged
beside the go-kart, gently telling Gil not to be afraid of its power. It was
Gil's first ride down a straightaway. Over the next few months, Luc
lengthened the lines until they turned into ovals and the kid was fearlessly
pounding them in white-knuckle laps.
But Luc taught his son more than just high-speed bravado. Gil credits his
dad with teaching him the workings of every aspect of a car, and how to
analyze the intricacies of racing. It all started to make sense to Gil early
in his go-kart career. The teenager was racing for the lead when his 125cc
engine dropped a cylinder. Gil refused to yield to faster traffic so one
irked karter slammed him into the infield. Adding insult to infraction, race
officials black-flagged Gil for not giving up track position. Gil ran to
Luc, demanding a protest.
"You should have seen it coming," Luc said.
"It wasn't my fault," Gil yelled. "Why can't you see the obvious?"
"Well," his dad replied, "there's more than one way to see the obvious."
Since that day, the racer hasn't met a problem he couldn't think to death.
Sometimes you can almost see the calculations flashing matrixlike behind his
coal-color eyes. Coulthard used to scratch his head when they shared hotel
rooms, as he watched Gil sketch modifications to his car late into the
night. Years later, Coulthard would appreciate those designs when he saw his
own engineers at McLaren trying the same thing. Team Penske's president, Tim
Cindric, calls de Ferran "Porque" because, he says, "Gil drives you nuts
with questions. He's like the kid who asks you why all the time." Others
simply call him The Professor.
Inside the Team Penske hauler, de Ferran's voluble teammate, Castroneves,
loves teasing him about that studious image. When Gil asked a crewman to
fetch him a fresh pair of driver's shorts recently, Castroneves innocently
offered to get them instead. Disappearing to a back room, Castroneves
grabbed a blowtorch and blew out the seat of the fresh pair of skivvies.
Handing them to Gil neatly folded, he guffawed with the crew as his partner
slipped them on. "And have you seen him dance?" asks Castroneves. "Oh,
you've never seen such a bozo."
De Ferran is resigned to playing the straight man, both in the hauler and in
the spotlight. So it's no surprise that he remains an enigma to fans like
the ones in Nazareth. And de Ferran, who acts as his own agent, seems
perfectly happy to remain that way. Though there's a knot of party-boy
Brazilians who live in Miami, he chooses to live among the anonymously
affluent on a block of pastel homes in Fort Lauderdale. He's much like any
other suburban dad, with one glaring exception: that 65-foot yacht tied to
the dock behind his house. A canal leading to the Atlantic runs by his pool
deck, and Gil keeps a captain on 24-hour call. On a recent break from
racing, Gil took his family down to the Keys. At night, Gil played gourmet
chef while his kids, Anna and Luke, played below in one of the ship's three
bedrooms. By day, they snorkeled and Gil sketched ships he one day hopes to
design.
When he left London, de Ferran wasn't sure what kind of life he'd find here.
Says Sir Jackie, "I think he's found a nice, quiet and comfortable one."
Adds Coulthard, "It's a shame he's not here with us in F1, because he should
be. But it's turned out quite all right, hasn't it?"
Yes, de Ferran says, it has. "When you get older, you're supposed to slow
down, but I feel the same now as I did when I was scraping by in London. All
the same things excite me. I think it's because I realize careers are so
fragile. I've seen so many people who've thought they arrived, especially
when they got to F1, and then lost touch with why they fell in love with
racing. The two championships made me realize that you never really arrive.
So you might as well enjoy getting there."
So much for a thrilling finish at Nazareth. As Sharp and Giaffone fly away
in a misty spray, de Ferran's motor kicks in as a last splash of methanol
sloshes into his fuel pump. Up to speed, he holds his breath for a 10-second
chug to the line and ends the daylong struggle in third place.
By the time he reaches the pits, reporters have gathered, waiting for the
IRL's newest member to lose his vaunted European cool. They want him to hurl
a helmet, his gloves ... or at least some blame.
Gil, are you disappointed with how things turned out?
"You know," he says, "I wouldn't have changed a thing."
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