MATCH RACING MULTIS
Photo:
Gilles Martin-Raget /
www.americascup.com
“I have spent most of my career racing monohulls and I can understand the caginess that some fans might feel towards the move to multis,” the Kiwi skipper said, “but I do love these boats, they look really exciting. There is, however, a big difference between monohull racing and multihull
racing. With
monohulls, it’s a race of metres, while with multis it’s a race of kilometres. It’s got to be about close racing otherwise there’s no point. The real test of these boats will be whether they are used again for the 35th edition of the America’s Cup.”
For those involved in the 34th edition – and that includes America’s Cup stars of the likes of Russell Coutts, Jimmy Spithill and Bertrand Pace – the move to catamarans has not taken anything away from the match racing aspect. “The match racing is as hard as it ever was,” Russell Coutts told the world’s media during an America’s Cup press conference. “The thinking behind many of the moves is the same as in monohulls, it just happens a lot faster. It is still very tactical and requires quick thinking. The game is the same, but at high speed.” It was a sentiment echoed by Mr Multihull himself, France’s Loick Peryron. “These boats are the right tool for the game we want to play,” Peyron declared.
Whether the America’s Cup’s future lies in two hulls or one, Butterworth says match racing must remain at its core. “The Cup has always been a match race between two
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boats and if it is just to become a fleet race there are plenty of other series’ that do that,” he said. “If the winner of the Cup is to be decided in the same way it always was and in my view the way it should stay, it’s about match racing. I think the only way the America’s Cup will survive is if teams hone their match racing skills in monohulls. The World Match Racing Tour has been around for 20 years or more and it’s always been the breeding ground for the America’s Cup sailors and should continue to be so. If you look at the
top guys in the America’s Cup like Dean Barker, Jimmy Spithill and Russell Coutts, they’ve all come through the World Match Racing Tour.”
“Can the AC72s be match raced?” Butterworth ponders. “We’ll have to wait and see about that one. I think the guys will, over time, work out how to match race the AC45s. It’s going to take all the regattas in the America’s Cup World Series to try to streamline the match racing. It has taken years of fine tuning to get the rules of match racing to where they are today, and now we’ve just restarted everything again. These multihulls are simply another direction for the discipline of match racing.”
So, for the meantime at least, multihull match racing is here to stay. But it could be all change again in 2013, given the holder of the America’s Cup gets to choose what boats they want to race in.
“Right now it’s very hard to forsee the future,” Butterworth said. “Nothing is sure in our sport. Whoever wins the Cup decides which boats to sail it in, so in 2013 we could see a move back to monohulls. This is a brave new world we’re now in, and who knows what’s going to happen.”
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