Update
TO DO LIST – Jack Griffin
The round-robin America’s Cup Qualifiers begin in Bermuda on 26 May 2017 – less than a year away. As usual in Cup campaigns, time is a – if not the – precious commodity but the teams have several other priorities to juggle between now and the beginning of racing. The most visible activity is the America’s Cup World Series. The final regatta of the series has now been announced for Fukuoka, Japan in November. The first-quarter 2017 event that ACEA talked about appears to have been quietly dropped.
To the casual observer the AC45F catamarans look pretty much like the boats that will be racing in Bermuda in 2017. But fleet racing in these strict one-design boats with stored energy to power the hydraulics bears little resemblance to the match racing we’ll see in very different yachts in 2017.
At this writing we’ve had six AC World Series events… and four of them have lost a full day from the racing schedule for too much wind (Portsmouth) or too little (Bermuda, New York and Chicago). Three teams have each won two events: series leader Emirates Team New Zealand, Land Rover BAR and Artemis Racing. No team has been on the podium at every event – the Kiwis and Oracle both got pushed off the podium for the first time in Chicago. And Cup favourites Oracle have yet to win an event.
This racing is much more important than many realise. Not only are there bonus points to be carried into the Louis Vuitton round robin – two for the winner of the series and one for the runner-up – the series results will also be used to break any ties at the end of the round robin. If you take into account the possible effects of AC World Series results, a team could go undefeated in the round robin and still lose the Qualifiers and the one-point lead that the winner of the Qualifiers will carry into the Match! Away from the AC World Series, designing the 15m-long largely one-design AC Class boats has top priority. Hulls, crossbeams and wing shape are fixed. Design work is focused on daggerboards and rudders, aerodynamics, control systems and wing structure, which
10 SEAHORSE
is closely related to the wing control system. Oracle, Artemis and Land Rover BAR have all sailed with AC Class wings in their test boats; Japan will shortly get a wing design from their cousins at Oracle. France and Team New Zealand had better get the wing structure and wing control systems right on the first try – the schedule is getting pretty tight if they need to make major modifications to the wing controls after initial tests. In addition, those two teams have yet to launch their test boats, although France should splash theirs before you read this. What are the Kiwis up to? They may be far behind the other teams in development work. Or they may just be much more careful about tipping their hand than they were in the last Cup cycle when they showed off foiling in their AC72 while some of the team leadership thought they should have tried to keep it secret longer. Oracle have already built three test boats, one of which was sold to Japan. Artemis have built two. BAR built two new boats, T2 and T3; their T1 test boat used a standard AC45 platform, unmodified in dimensions and layout. T2 is now a museum piece in the Tech Deck public space at their Portsmouth headquarters. T3 is the development boat. There are loud whispers about a fourth BAR test boat.
Originally the Protocol limited teams to three test boats, but that limitation was dropped by an amendment. Cost control, anyone? Oracle, Japan, Artemis and BAR have a lot of experience sailing boats that are very similar to what they will be racing in 2017. Oracle, Japan and Artemis have the added advantage of being able to sail and test together in Bermuda.
Everyone needs to be building their 2017 race yacht… right about now. The AC Class raceboats can be launched on 27 December, 150 days before the first races of the AC Qualifiers. Oracle, Japan and Artemis will undoubtedly do final assembly and launch at their well-established bases in Bermuda. What about the other three? If they launch in their home waters
they will probably lose around 30 of their 150 development days while they disassemble the yacht, ship it to Bermuda and then put
RICK TOMLINSON
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