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Page 8. MAINE COASTAL NEWS April 2015


Yachting News Former F1 Chief joins BAR


Ben Ainslie Racing (BAR) has an- nounced that Martin Whitmarsh, former CEO of The McLaren Group and Team Principal of the McLaren F1 team, will be joining the British challenger for the 35th America’s Cup. Whitmarsh will take the position of Chief Executive Offi cer, working alongside Ainslie to bring the Cup home. There are many sporting and technical similarities between the America’s Cup and Formula One, and Whitmarsh will bring the perfect skill set to the team; an engineering background and high-level experience of managing a technology company focused on top fl ight competition. Whitmarsh will report to Ben Ainslie – BAR’s Team Princi- pal – and the board, on which he will have a seat.


“I’m delighted that Martin is joining us,” commented Ben Ainslie. “When we fi rst started to put together the plan for BAR, McLaren were one of the aspirations. So it’s particularly appropriate to have one of the original architects of that model as our new CEO. Martin came highly recommended by many authoritative fi gures in the motorsport industry, and already has good relationships with several of our key partners, particularly the head of Red Bull Advanced Technol- ogies, Adrian Newey.” Martin Whitmarsh worked with Adrian Newey at McLaren for nine years between 1997 and 2006. Whitmarsh will join the team in the


fi nal few weeks before they move into their new purpose-built headquarters in Ports- mouth. It was in the south coast city that Whitmarsh studied engineering at the city’s University, before starting his career at BAE Systems’ Hamble facility. He was quickly promoted to work on advanced composites in Weybridge, rising to Manufacturing Di- rector before moving to join McLaren as Head of Operations in 1989. By 1997 he was Managing Director of the Formula 1 team, eventually rising to CEO of McLaren Racing and McLaren Group alongside his role as Deputy Chairman of the McLaren Automotive Group.


“After 25 years at McLaren it’s great to be able to turn my energies and experience to such an exciting sporting and techni- cal challenge. McLaren developed into a multifaceted business, and I hope that my experience will help BAR in its aspiration for a sustainable business model, along with the clear goal of winning the America’s Cup and bringing it back to British waters,” com- mented Whitmarsh on the challenge ahead. Martin Whitmarsh will take up his po-


AMERICA'S CUP & VENDEE GLOBE NEWS sition with the team in April.


LUNA ROSSA STARTS THE SECOND PHASE OF MODIFICATIONS TO THE TWO AC45S


The next 40 days will be dedicated to new structural modifi cations of the catama- rans based on the results of the sea trials carried out in the past months.


Max Sirena, skipper of Luna Rossa, said: “The design of any winning boat requires a close collaboration between sailors, designers and the shore team: each modifi cation is the result of months of tests, simulations and a constant search of performing solutions. The feedback that the sailors give to the designers regarding their feelings onboard is crucial. If this is true for all boats, it is even more important in the design of full-foiling catamarans, where each parameter is taken to the extreme.” In the coming weeks the team will focus therefore on the development of the boats; the new modifi cations will be tested during the next phase of sea trials scheduled for mid-April.


Bermuda Training – Writing the Playbook


Bermuda will be the venue for the


35th America’s Cup. It’s a brand new race track for foiling multihulls, and Ben Ainslie Racing (BAR) were the fi rst to test it back in January. It was immediately clear that it would be much more of a strategic and tac- tical test than the drag-race that dominated the 34th Cup match in San Francisco. Many valuable lessons were learnt by the sailing team during their January training camp, not least of which was to return as soon as possible to start work on analysing the intricacies of the race course. Sailing Manager Jono Macbeth and new Team Coach Rob Wilson will lead the project to develop a playbook for foiling multihulls on Bermuda’s Great Sound.


The sun lifts above the horizon and lights up another, glorious Bermudian day. Sailing Manager Jono Macbeth and Sailing Team Coach Rob Wilson are deep in conversation about the day’s sailing plan.“We’ve just taken on Rob as our full- time coach,” commented Macbeth, “he comes from a high-performance back- ground, racing the old Olympic catamaran, the Tornado, and has coached Extreme Sailing Series winners and Youth World Champions. We wanted Rob because he’s got a very analytical mindset, an engineering and sailmaking background and great com-


munications skills – all essential to coaching at this level.”


The rest of BAR’s sailing team are busy preparing the boats. The two multihulls are twenty feet long, and both are equipped with a hydrofoiling system that is a very basic version of the one that will allow the Amer- ica’s Cup boat to reach speeds in excess of 50mph. The speeds are more modest for these smaller boats, but more importantly, they are equal. The boats are as identical as it’s possible to build them, and so they make a great platform for testing the fastest way around a race track. It’s the reason that the team are here for this training camp. They’ve got work to do reconnoitring the America’s Cup course.


When Bermuda threw its hat into the ring as a potential venue for the 35th Cup, it was already a familiar venue to many of the world’s top sailors. One of the oldest and most famous offshore races fi nishes here – the Newport to Bermuda Race. And one of the oldest and most famous match racing tournaments is still held here – the Gold Cup. However, no one had ever looked at the Great Sound with a view to racing 62 foot foiling America’s Cup boats doing speeds that would cost you a driver’s licence in an urban area. While charts were quick- ly unrolled, distances were measured, weather data was analysed and heads were scratched... everyone knew that there would be no substitute for actually sailing the race track.


After the announcement that Bermuda would be the venue for the 35th America’s Cup, the BAR sailing team were the fi rst to get sailing and foiling on the Great Sound. They spent over a week at the venue for a winter training session at the end of January, and when they came home, Sailing Manager Jono Macbeth commented: “We turned up in Bermuda with precon- ceived ideas about how big the race course was going to be, where it was going to be, the wind directions and strengths. It’s not until you’re there on the ground that you really get a good feel for what’s going on. And one thing we learned was that the race course is going to be pretty small, it’s going to be tight, and there’s going to be a lot of manoeuvring. This is a sailor’s race course, and we knew that we had to get back there as soon as we could for more detailed analysis.” There was a whole lot more to learn – knowledge that would need to be distilled into a playbook for the venue. It was a project for the team’s new coach, Rob Wilson to take on. Sailing is almost unique in being a track


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sport where the track changes every moment of every day. The closest sporting analogy to the America’s Cup is Formula 1, and their teams carefully measure every inch of the race tracks that they must compete on; the camber, the bumps, the fl at spots, the corners and the straights are all intricately mapped and known. None of this is possible when wind and water make up the arena. The task of understanding the America’s Cup race course is more complex by several orders of magnitude than anything faced by an F1 team.


The nature of the Bermuda race course will be determined by the wind speed and wind direction, and the height and speed of the waves. “The team’s March training camp is focused on the subtleties of the wind shifts and speed changes, the recurring patterns that will occur in the differing wind di- rections and course orientations,” explains Sailing Manager Jono Macbeth, after he has fi nished talking to Wilson. “We start by working with a local sailor to get an over- view of the venue; to gather some thoughts both on what we see while we are there, and how it might be different to what we can expect during the America’s Cup month of June. Then we settle down to our own pro- gramme of testing.”


In its essence, the complex mass of data boils down to one simple question; in that set of conditions (which must be carefully recorded) which was the fastest route up the race course? And while it’s possible to calcu- late the answer with a suffi ciently complete description of the conditions, it’s much more effective to have two boats of equal speeds sail the different routes and see who gets to the fi nish fi rst. Two boats just like BAR’s foiling multihulls. “A lot of our training here will involve starting the two boats on the race course with instructions to go a particular way,” says Macbeth. “Then we see who gets there fi rst. We need to do it plenty of times to check the result is repeatable, and to make sure we understand why one way is faster than any other. These are the perfect boats for the job. Once we start sailing our Cup boats an enormous amount of energy goes into the development of their speed potential. We don’t have that distraction here with these two smaller training boats. It’s all about the race course.”


Continued on Page 19.


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