Image credit: ACEA / Giles Martin Raget.


"Some months ago, I observed that the AC-72 had not been the glorious success its promoters had hoped."


sensationally fast, but their speed is matched more than equally by their fragility and seeming unsuitability for purpose. Those that have taken to the water have largely given the naysayers a field day and their progenitors serious headaches. They have brought into question their reliability to the extent the major design problem may be in providing teams with boats that will last the distance between now and the middle of next September – will the Golden Gate YC’s champion, Oracle Team USA, have a suitable vessel with which to defend the Cup, or indeed will there be a winner of the Louis Vuitton Cup in shape to challenge?”  These questions remain unanswered and they intensified when Oracle capsized early in its AC-72 training (and lost two months of sailing). Only nine days earlier, helmsman Jimmy Spithill had pitchpoled and capsized an AC-45 while racing and the second example was an enlarged mirror image – both boats dug in their bows and then fell sideways with their sterns in the air. No lessons learned there then? There may be now, but with the damage estimated in the region of $10 million, the question had to be raised: “How long can this go on?”  Of course it is a regular feature of catamaran racing that the leeward bow digs in when the boat is borne away – that has been recognised for more years than catamarans have been raced in the America’s Cup, and, what is more, with boats that were as developed in their time as today’s AC-72s.   The C-class catamarans of the late 1960s were developing wing rigs that were proportionally much heavier than either the AC-45s or the AC-72s


Image credit: Ian Roman July 2013 7


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