However, as I write, it’s just a fortnight until the deadline that BMW Oracle set itself for announcing the host city for the 34th America’s Cup, and no agreement is in place. Things have been getting heated between Ellison’s people and Newsom’s people, so the rumours go. Talk of any alternative to San Francisco ceased some time ago, so maybe the city feels in a position to play hardball with Ellison. Not a game that anyone would enter into lightly, as Ernesto Bertarelli knows only too well.
Meanwhile, back on the water, BMW Oracle has been acquitting itself nicely at the final Louis Vuitton Trophy event in Dubai. The team, skippered by James Spithill, dominated the early phases although went down to Dean Barker and Emirates Team New Zealand 2-0 in the final. A nice way for Team New Zealand to conclude its love affair with the old America’s Cup keelboats. Unquestionably the Kiwis have been the dominant nation in America’s Cup racing over the past 20 years, but it will be interesting to see how much the shift to multihulls has an effect on shifting the global powerbase in sailing.
Much as it will please Barker to have beaten Spithill in some slow-boat match racing, Spithill is arguably the hotter property in America’s Cup right now. Unlike Barker and the vast majority of his rivals, Spithill has already served a two-year apprenticeship in learning to master large, superfast multihulls powered by solid wing sails.
It’s no surprise then to see that Dean Barker and Emirates Team New Zealand have signed up to the Extreme 40 circuit next year, along with America’s Cup newcomers from Sweden, Artemis. BMW Oracle and Alinghi competed on this tour a couple of years ago when those teams were doing everything they could to cram invaluable multihull racing experience into the year before the 33rd America’s Cup. Now, once again, the Extreme 40 circuit finds itself perfectly placed to take advantage of the massive shift in the Cup world.
© Gilles Martin-Raget / BMW ORACLE Racing
There were few things that Alinghi and BMW Oracle had in common, but they understood the value of investing in French offshore multihull racing expertise. For the past 20 years or more, the French have led the way in multihull development, and more than ever the French must fancy their chances at being able to win the America’s Cup on their own terms. This seems to be the way that Aleph - Equipe De France is thinking, a French syndicate which has recently been announced as the fifth team to officially enter the America’s Cup.
Headed up by match racing expert Bertrand Pacé, formerly of Emirates Team New Zealand and BMW Oracle, along with offshore legend Alain Gautier, this team is billing itself as an all-French effort. Very laudable to play the national card, but why would you? Why, when there is no nationality rule forcing you, would you make it even harder for yourself to win the most impregnable trophy in all of sailing? Perhaps, after the Kiwi dominance of keelboat racing, the French believe their time has come, now that it’s all about the multihull.
Personally, I can’t see it. What football team tries to win the Premier League with eleven English players on the pitch? When the rules of the America’s Cup permits you to recruit the most talented sailors in the world, why would you restrict yourself to one nation? If the French win the next America’s Cup, I’ll eat my hat.
Suddenly multihulls are flavour of the month. With the next America’s Cup set to take place in 72-foot catamarans, the International Sailing Federation has now reinstated multihulls into the Olympic line-up for the Rio 2016 Games. And the boat that is now rejected from the Olympic Games? ...
The new vision for the America’s Cup laid out by Russell Coutts is certainly different. For some, it has proven too different. First casualty after the announcement of wing-masted 72-foot catamarans racing in 2013 (venue yet to be determined) was Team Origin. After spending millions simply navigating his team through the past three directionless years of America’s Cup limbo, Sir Keith Mills has pulled the plug on the campaign just as the fog starts to clear...
Russell Coutts has upset the applecart with his radical announcement that 72-foot catamarans will be the weapon of choice for the 34th America’s Cup. Not only that, but he’s talking about wing-masted catamarans. Sound familiar? It was a wing mast that powered BMW Oracle Racing’s trimaran to victory last February in Valencia...
All eyes were on Team Origin at the start of the Louis Vuitton Trophy in La Maddalena, the sparse but ruggedly beautiful island off the northern coast of Sardinia. Just days earlier, team director Mike ‘Moose’ Sanderson was fired by Sir Keith Mills. It was a terse press release that announced the New Zealander’s departure, and none sounded more surprised than Sanderson himself...
In Britain we’ve spent the last few weeks getting used to the idea of two rival political leaders putting aside their tribal enmities to form a coalition government. In the world of the America’s Cup, Sir Russell Coutts and Vincenzo Onorato are the David Cameron/Nick Clegg combo looking to straighten out a sporting event which they view as being in need of salvation after seven years of abuse by Alinghi...
Since winning the America’s Cup in mid-February, Russell Coutts has barely had time to draw breath. The CEO of BMW Oracle Racing flew with Larry Ellison and the rest of the team for some Auld Mug-wielding celebrations in San Francisco, home of the Golden Gate Yacht Club which they represented, and San Diego, where the team had carried out many months of development and testing of their winged-trimaran...
With all avenues of appeal exhausted in the New York Supreme Court, it is finally with some certainty that we can say that Valencia will be the venue for the 33rd America’s Cup. Amen to that. Not that I objected greatly to Ras Al Khaimah in the United Arab Emirates, which was the point of Alinghi’s last-ditch appeal to the Court. The sailing conditions there were more likely to be stable and predictable than what Valencia is expected to provide in late winter...
BMW Oracle has been carrying out some extensive TV trials of monohulls and multihulls in Valencia. The aim, says the Defender, is to work out which kind of boat is going to offer the biggest bang for buck in Russell Coutts’s vision of a more media-friendly and commercially-attractive America’s Cup...
Louis Vuitton has been an integral part of the America’s Cup since the luxury goods company first gave its name to the Louis Vuitton Challenger Series back in Newport 1983. That close association continued up to Valencia 2007, but following Alinghi’s successful defence of the Cup, Louis Vuitton withdrew its backing...
So now we’ve seen the power of wing rigs in action in the America’s Cup, what possibility of a trickledown of technology into other forms of sailing? What about superyachts? BMW Oracle’s design team director Mike Drummond observed, tongue in cheek: “If you go to Wings R Us.com, you can get any size you like.” Of course, this technology is anything but off the shelf, but nor is it new, as Drummond also pointed out: “Wings are not new, they’ve been used by birds for quite a long time...
So now we know. Wings trump sails. Theory has always stated that a wing rig should be faster than conventional sails. But the challenge was actually to put a wing rig into practice, to be able to build it in less than six months, and also to manage the logistics of it...
Race 2 was set to take place two days later on the Sunday. It was another long wait while Harold Bennett looked for suitable conditions in which to start the race. The cut-off time of 4pm was just minutes away when Bennett called for the start procedure to begin...
