If the action in the Extreme 40 catamaran class is anything to go by, we are in for a thrilling spectacle at the 33rd America's Cup, and the sailors are in for a very dangerous one.

Although this is the third season of racing for the Extreme 40 circuit, there seems to have been much more capsizing going on this year then in previous seasons. Ed Baird, who is steering Alinghi's boat on the iShares Cup circuit around Europe, was first to capsize on the very first day of the first event at Lake Lugano in Switzerland. Although this is his first season on the 40-foot catamaran circuit, and so doesn't have the benefit of being able to make a direct comparison, he attributes the greater number of capsizes to the higher standard of racing in the fleet, and the high winds which they have been sailing in. "More capsizes, more wind and more intensity," he says, which is exactly what he had been hoping for.

After all, while to other teams the iShares Cup is an end in itself, for Baird and his Alinghi colleagues it is a learning platform to make sure they are suitably prepared to defend the greater prize, the 33rd America's Cup in 90-foot multihulls. "Sailing the Extreme 40, we're trying to do everything we can learn as much as possible, to put ourselves under pressure."

Baird and Co certainly managed that during one race in Lugano. "Unfortunately, we had a combination of difficult timing, just at the point we got hit by a squall, compounded by a change of team member," says Baird, who was sailing with a mainsheet trimmer who hadn't raced on board before that gusty day. Baird's usual sidekick, Rodney Ardern, was signed off games when he developed a back problem just the day before the event. "We sent Rodney away to get some rest, brought another team member up. That was the first race the guy had sailed with me. It turned out to be difficult situation, with the timing of gust, the position on the race course, and our lack of familiarity as a crew. It was very disappointing, but not unusual or surprising for top teams to make mistakes like that."

Indeed, many other teams have suffered the indignity - and terror - of a capsize this season. Russell Coutts needed nine stitches to his leg after BMW Oracle tipped over one of their Extreme 40s during in-house training. Last year's winning team have not been immune, with Rob Greenhalgh's Team Origin toppling in high winds at Hyeres, and Randy Smyth came mighty close in a ‘will he, won't he' moment aboard Hilfiger. Fortunately for the Olympic medallist, that particular occasion the American escaped by the skin of his teeth. Not that Smyth is averse to capsizing on request. He was technical consultant and helmsman of Kevin Costner's 60-foot trimaran in the box office bomb, Waterworld, and did a similar job standing in for Pierce Brosnan in The Thomas Crown Affair, where the script required him to execute a spectacular capsize with a 40-foot multihull.

So capsizing seems an unavoidable occurrence in these demanding and skittish Extreme 40s. Baird and his team reviewed the painful memory of their Lugano swim with typical, professional thoroughness. "We looked back at it, looked through the videos, to understand what could have been different, and there was quite a lot we could have done differently. We had our gennaker up, others had theirs down, we had our daggerboards down, others had theirs up, all those sorts of things showed up from that incident. It's all part of the learning process and we learned a lot from that, and it's changed how we handle gusts now."

Of course the Extreme 40s are frisky boats, but they are less than half the length of the multihulls that will contest the next America's Cup, and they have a fraction of the power. Even so, Baird sees the iShares Cup as a very useful exercise. "It's always helpful racing a smaller version of something bigger, whatever kind of boat you're talking about. And we're looking at ways of understanding trimarans as well as cats, although it's more difficult to do that in racing situations."

Hmmm. Trimarans, he says. Does that mean Alinghi is building a three-float boat for the Cup, or that they believe that's what BMW Oracle has built? No one other than the teams knows for sure, but most pundits are united in their belief that Defender and Challenger will roll out trimarans for the big occasion. With that in mind, Alinghi has also been training and in-house racing with two Open 60 tris, Foncia which the team capsized earlier in the spring and Banque Populaire IV. Alinghis skipper Brad Butterworth commented: "We are very pleased to have such high calibre boats to train with. Both Foncia and Banque Populaire IV are accomplished race boats and we look forward to a summer of two-boat training and to gaining as much crewing and big boat experience as possible before getting on to our multihull sometime at the end of the year.

"We now need to hone our boat handling skills, manoeuvres and mark approaches by matching up to another boat. Having crew on both ORMA 60s will increase our learning curve exponentially."  

After looking a bit light for in-house multihull experience, Alinghi is fast catching up, not only with access to the ORMA 60 tris but also with the appointment of another French multihull star, Franck Proffit. This is a man who knows all about driving big multihulls hard and fast, having been part of the Groupama 3 project, which last year set a new 24 hour distance record of 794 miles.

"There is a huge amount of work to do and time is short," said Proffit of his new appointment, which will see him work with both the sailing and design teams at Alinghi. "It took us more than two years to build Groupama 3 and here we have to build a giant multihull in a very short period of time. We have to optimise very quickly. This is a great team though. I feel closer to Alinghi's values than those of the other teams." Teams? I thought there was only one other team, BMW Oracle. Which is interesting, because that's exactly who Proffit's skipper from Groupama 3 is sailing for. The French have never come close to winning the Cup in their own right, but they are instrumental to the outcome of this one.