Too Fast to Be Legal: The Shark Skin Scandal

Bob Hawke looks down the camera and says: any boss who sacks an employee for not showing up today is a bum.
A nation stops. Beer is raised. A boat wins. A jacket becomes iconic.

That’s what we remember.

But under the surface, something else was happening. Not just a race between boats, but a race in how water itself was being handled. A surface that didn’t fight the flow, but shaped it.

This episode sits inside that moment.

It traces what happens when performance shifts from effort to design. When the edge doesn’t come from trying harder, but from moving differently.

A solution that had already been solved - quietly, over millions of years.

Using a biomimicry lens, Pia explores what happens when something works too well. When an advantage moves from impressive to uncomfortable. When winning starts to feel like a problem.

Because nature doesn’t level the playing field.
We do.

S2E08

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Created and hosted by Pia Williams
Clever by Nature. Feral by Design.

Transcript

Too Fast to Be Legal: The Shark Skin Scandal

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Nature calls it survival of the fittest. We ban it as an unfair advantage. I'm Pia, and this is Feral by Design. Today I'm taking you not a million years back in time, not at the start this time anyway, and not ten thousand kilometers away like a couple of episodes ago. Just come with me today, just down the road, to a local brewery that is dangerously close to us. A crowd favourite. We're heading back to the 1980s, to a race that shocked a nation, a shark, and something that worked so well it got banned. This is a tale of secret squirrels and cheeky monkeys.

Pub noises

SPEAKER_00 0:49

Hawkes Brewery, aka the Bob Hawkes Leisure Centre, is one of those places that's committed fully to the bit, you know, pool

80s tunes

SPEAKER_00 0:58

tables, 80s memorabilia everywhere, and a deliberately designed old school Chinese restaurant that immediately transports you back to that decade. Bob agreed to lend his name to the brewery on one condition. Every royalty that he earns went straight to land care. Classic Bob. For anyone not Australian, Bob Hawke was our Prime Minister through a lot of the 80s. And Beloved doesn't quite cover it. He was something else. Out in the back section of this brewery is the pool room, I'm air-quoting there, where all the trophies and memorabilia get relegated. At Hawke's, it's basically a shrine. It's amazing. And in one cabinet, there's a particular photo of Bob. Laughing, boxing kangaroo jacket, absolutely delighted with himself. That photo was taken the day Australia won the America's Cup in 1983. First non-American winner in 132 years. The country, this country, was obsessed. We at home even named our budgie after the winning boat, Australia 2, if you can believe it. Best in peace, Aussie 2. And on live television, our Prime Minister looked down the camera and said, I tell you what, any boss who sacks anyone for not turning up the day is a bum. Fast

out

SPEAKER_00 2:25

forward almost 45 years later to me, in that pool room a couple of weeks ago, just standing there with my beer, laughing. The only thing I can remember as a young kid at that time is that our Prime Minister had a good head of hair, drank beer, and said bum on TV. It was the 80s. But here's the thing. We remember the beer, we remember the speech, we remember the kangaroo jacket. Everything that happened above the waterline. But quietly, a different race had started brewing three meters below the surface. In 1983, Australia pulled back the curtain, literally, the winged keel, this design that was inspired by aerodynamics and the physics of birds in flight, was dramatically unveiled to the world. Secret squirrel indeed. It won the day, the race, and to be honest, the year for a lot of Australians.

Marker

SPEAKER_00 3:24

The Americans went away. And when they came back several years later, something had shifted. See, this wasn't just about winning anymore. It felt a little personal. And with stakes that high, they turned to nature. I so love that thought that when there's that much at stake and there's egos and it's so much more than winning the race itself, they turned to nature. Nature gets competition.

swim tune

SPEAKER_00 3:55

So the American team started looking at sharks. Specifically the short-fin Mako shark. It's faster than a great white. It's not about the ambush. It's built for sustained speed across open water. And its skin under a microscope is not smooth. It's covered in tiny tooth-like scales called denticles. They're microscopic ridges that run along the body in precise alignment. Think of it this way: if you could run your finger along it one way, it would feel almost silky. But you run the finger the other way and it would feel like really abrasive sandpaper, rough enough to scrape you. And actually, let's be clear, it's a shark, okay? Let's not be close enough to be running fingers any which way. What those ridges do is control how water moves across the surface. So instead of letting water tumble and drag, these denticles shape the flow. They create tiny organized swirls. Think pirouettes at pace, keeping it moving cleanly along the body. The shark doesn't fight the water, it manages it quietly the whole time and at speed. It's been doing this for roughly 450 million years. So

racing tune

SPEAKER_00 5:24

the team, with the help of NASA and 3M, those little design chestnuts, copied it and applied it to their hull. Tiny grooves, riblets, applied to the full hull surface, mimicking the geometry of those denticals. Same principle, control the flow, reduce the drag. The performance gain is marginal in absolute terms. At elite racing level, marginal is everything. Stars and stripes ran it all the way to the cup. It worked. Nature spent millions of years solving a drag problem. Humans spent millions of dollars figuring out nature had already solved it. And then a rules committee decided it wasn't allowed. Ruling these surface films are unfair modifications. Banned is what happens when something works too well inside a system that wasn't built for it. Nature doesn't do that. If something has an edge, it keeps it until something else adapts. The Mako shark is now listed as endangered, so banned to fish it. Two bands. One too fast for the race, the second, too valuable for the ocean. But it didn't disappear. Same idea, different systems and industries. Still working. People kept experimenting with it, applying the same principle in different places. Constrain it in one place, it shows up somewhere else. Which is interesting, right? Because we don't ban it everywhere. We seem to ban when we're competing for cups and for medals and for titles. That same idea of mimicking shark skin ended up on swimsuits at the Beijing Olympics in in 2008. And guess what? Banned. Nature doesn't level the playing field in our systems. It depends who's competing. Just leaving that one out there. I'm here. This is Feral by Design. Nature runs on feedback loops, and Ferrell does too. Here's a reaction to the last episode on dementia and fireflies. Amy from New South Wales wrote Really genuine and insightful. As someone who cared for my grandmother with dementia, I felt validated. Also, genius creative concept. How cool the fireflies! Thanks, Amy. And yes, very cool.