Last month we mentioned a revealing Twitter comment from Oracle’s bowman Brad Webb who said the American boat had flown through to leeward of the red Artemis boat. Where Oracle was hydrofoiling, the Swedish boat was doing that conventional thing that boats do - of floating on the water. But as Webb, pointed out, merely floating is soooo last century. “They might be rethinking no-fly strategy,” tweeted Webb, a harsh but fair observation of Artemis.
The lesson has not been lost on the Swedish team, who have now put their boat back in the shed for some drastic plastic surgery. Even then, when it re-emerges it won’t be a fully foiling beast but will move the team closer to the direction already being pursued by the other three teams. According to team boss Paul Cayard, their second boat - the one they’ll race in anger - is also being reconfigured from a ‘skimmer’ to a fully-foiling catamaran.
So it appears the design dilemma between floating or foiling has well and truly been put to bed. Even on the short courses of the forthcoming America’s Cup, the higher peak speeds of hydrofoiling are now deemed to outweigh the downside of greater drag at low speeds, when there isn’t enough wind to lift the hulls above the waves.
The AC72 was predicted to attain speeds up to 40 knots, and the Kiwis are already achieving that, and then some, during their training and racing sessions against their Italian friends on Luna Rossa. During one downwind leg on the Hauraki Gulf near Auckland, the Emirates Team New Zealand boat averaged over 39 knots on a leg that included three gybes. So the pure straight-line speed must be well in excess of 40 knots. No wonder Artemis has been rethinking its no-fly strategy.
While the wing rigs are one of the most eye-catching and awe-inspiring aspects of these wonder boats, the design of the underwater surfaces is becoming established as the chief battleground for the design teams. Artemis, and Oracle too, are converting AC45s to foiling boats while they wait for their second and final AC72s to be launched. The tactics at foiling speeds become radically different to those used in more conventional boats, as Artemis helmsman Nathan Outteridge knows very well from his exploits on the International Moth, an 11-foot carbon-fibre foiling dinghy in which he has won the World Championship. When you’re foiling you’re sailing twice, three-times, sometimes even four times the speed of the actual wind. How can a sailing boat actually travel multiples faster than its power source - the wind? It takes some getting your head around the concept. So the teams need all the foiling practice they can get, whatever the size of vessel.
The AC45 has been a great precursor to the main event, but apart from a final America’s Cup World Series event in Naples in April, that’s about it for the fast 45-footer. Except that a bunch of national youth teams have been trialling for a spot in the Red Bull Youth America’s Cup, which nicely fills the gap in early September between the end of the Louis Vuitton Cup and the America’s Cup proper. The only risk is that the spectacle of 10 identical AC45s flying around in close proximity might eclipse the America’s Cup itself, with two potentially mismatched 72-footers separated by minutes on the race course. It will be thrilling to see two AC72s flying above the surface at 40 knots, but will we get the thrill of a close contest? It’s hard to imagine, although I hope my scepticism is proven wrong.
As we reach the business end of this America’s Cup cycle, we find ourselves in the ‘phoney war’ of dissembling and misinformation. Four fast boats on or above the water, yet the news flow has dried to a trickle of Twitter comments. Don’t we, the fans, deserve better? No! This is ‘their’ Cup, and ‘they’ can do what they want.
Terry Hutchinson has always been one of the most personable and straight-talking characters on the America’s Cup scene. So it’s sad to see the 44-year-old lose his job as skipper of Artemis Racing. But such are the hard decisions that must be made as we reach the business end of this Cup cycle.
With a home crowd to please, Luna Rossa burst on to the America’s Cup World Series with a performance that delighted their passionate fans and struck fear into the hearts of their competitors. The wild reception in Naples was a reminder that no one can top the Italians in their enthusiasm for sport - even sailing!
“If it doesn't break, it’s too heavy,” was a bold statement that defined legendary designer Ben Lexcen’s America’s Cup career. If anyone pursues that mantra for the 34th America’s Cup, I’ll eat my hat. Artemis Racing have just become the first team to point a full-size wing rig into the sky. But no one wants to be the first to have one of these space-age structures come tumbling down.
So all us ‘experts’ observing the America’s Cup have been saying that no one’s ever going to take it away from Oracle next September. But after the defender’s shock pitchpole and subsequent destruction of its multimillion dollar AC72, the odds on a Kiwi victory have shortened considerably.
Any British sailing fan has known just how good Ben Ainslie is for a long time. Even so, watching him win his fourth gold at London 2012 still took my breath away. Question is, will any of that superhuman success ever give Ben a chance to take a leading man’s role in the America’s Cup?
After some ho-hum performances in Europe, I’d begun to wonder if the sailors at Oracle were really that bothered about results on the AC45 circuit. But after a barnstorming performance in Newport, I’ve revised my view. Whichever way you look at it - financial, technological or in pure sailing terms - the Defender is going to be very hard to beat.
Visiting the Amels yard in Vlissingen, it was staggering to see how far the build of the Amels 199 has progressed since I last wrote about the radical Tim Heywood design a year or so ago. Heywood hopes the audacious curves of the 199 will forge a new direction in superyacht design, and having seen her in the flesh, I hope so too.
San Diego was meant to by my warm-weather escape from the English winter, but the shorts and T-shirt never even got unpacked. Should have brought my umbrella. Still, if the weather disappointed, the America’s Cup World Series continues to deliver unpredictability and drama. Question is, how many of the nine teams in San Diego will we see next year? For some, money’s too tight to mention, but at least the return of Luna Rossa provides the prospect of another big team to challenge the might of Oracle Racing.
After a summer of some of the most high-speed but dull racing the world never wanted to see, the America’s Cup Final delivered some of the most spectacular, unpredictable match racing in the event’s 162-year history. I thought the 2007 final between New Zealand and Alinghi was great. San Francisco 2013 was better.
The two races I witnessed of the Louis Vuitton Cup finals in San Francisco, I was fortunate to see two boats cross the finish line, both intact and still sailing. Until that point, the challenger finals had been a war of attrition, with a nosedive bringing the Kiwis precariously close to capsizing their usually impeccably sailed AC72, Aotearoa.
Changing the rules at the last minute... was it for safety reasons or to gain competitive advantage? In a game where anything goes in the quest for victory, this could be seen as typical Machiavellian fare for the America’s Cup. Trouble is, so soon after the death of Andrew Simpson, quibbling over the merits of ‘rudder elevators’ seems a bit trivial and tasteless.