"Tacking angles are not so complicated," he said. "Gybing angles are probably the most difficult aspect of sailing on the AC72. There is a big difference between a foiling gybe and a non foiling gybe and, most of the time, the result is a middle way. To work out these angles you can check the instruments, but the only thing you can really rely on is your own experience. The more gybes you try the better you get at getting the angles right. When optimising the Luna Rossa AC72 for straight line speed Draper said his priorities were: "The rake on the board for the foiling, the true wind angle and what the next plan is really. His sources of information to keep the boat sailing at full tilt? A combination of electronic data and his 'spider senses'. "Two of them are instruments and one of them is your own experience," he said. So far the teams have been focused on racing against themselves to hone their crew work with only occasional skirmishes down in Auckland and recently in San Francisco between ETNZ and Luna Rossa to give us any indication of what the actual racing might be like. Draper reckons the early rounds of the Louis Vuitton Series might not see much classic match racing as the crews focus on getting through July intact. He also didn't expect to see any old school
pre-start engagements either given the nature of the boats and the short pre-start sequence. "When it first starts in July, I think we might not see as much match racing, but as it goes on the teams will get closer and closer and it’ll get better and better," he said. "With the pre-starts, there isn’t as much time as there was with the AC45 and even then, with those, we were limited for time. "However I think we’ll see some nice racing, we’ll see boats having tacking duels, boats gybing on one and other and sailing really close to one and other, with the boats foiling and gybing at the same time. It should be pretty incredible." Bruni agree that the pre-starts would provide little opportunity for boat on boat maneuvering: "We can’t actually talk about a real dial up in AC72 pre-starts," he said. "The two boats enter the start box at two minutes and the line is positioned in a way that does not favour the dial up. Moreover with these boats it could be a quite dangerous manoeuvre. Probably the most interesting phase of the pre-start is going to be the very last few seconds when we will see some fishtailing. All that said, there's no doubt that entering at two minutes makes the manoeuvres quite frenetic.
25 Image credit: Chris Cameron/ETNZ
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