This should be good!
Doyle Sails’ design head Richard Bouzaid is looking forward to the sail making challenges of America’s Cup 36… but perhaps even more so to the trickledown to follow
Predictably the return of soft sails to the America’s Cup under the new New Zealand-led regime has sailmakers rubbing their hands – not so much for the commercial prospects as for the potential design and technology leaps that will probably ensue. Having been forced to the sidelines by the hard- wing technology of the past two Cup cycles, sailmakers are once again at the forefront of delivering the driving force for the 2021 iteration. Richard Bouzaid, design chief at Doyle Sails, has long years of experience in America’s Cup, Whitbread and Volvo Ocean Race, Vendée Globe and other grand prix campaigns. He knows first-hand that nothing propels the game forward quite like the America’s Cup. ‘It will be very interesting to see what evolves in terms of the rules around soft sails. It will undoubtedly be good for our industry as a whole. It will allow the whole game to progress and introduce new ideas.’
Early concept drawings of the radical new foiling monohull for the 36th America’s Cup have shown a double luff mainsail, which is effectively an effort to create a smooth, wing-like transition from the mast to the sail. ‘That could become a more mainstream sailing solution down the track,’ Bouzaid acknowledges. ‘Lots of people have tried that sort of thing. Inflatable wings and double-sided sails are different ways of creating more efficient wing shapes. It is definitely conceivable that we will see this type of sail being used on production, cruising-type boats in the future.
‘There has always been
trickledown from the America’s Cup. Most recently we have seen foils being the big thing and already we
62 SEAHORSE
are seeing cruising multihulls on foils. Also, the Vendée Globe-type boats, particularly Alex Thompson’s, have shown what can be done with foils in monohulls.
‘Maybe the next big thing will be wing-type mainsails with double luffs. It is really not that new. Kent Luxton was playing around with double-sided headsails in the 1983 America’s Cup,’ he says in reference to the fellow New Zealander, who was a sailmaking partner with Tom Schnackenberg in 1978 and has three America’s Cup and six round-the-world campaigns on his CV.
‘What happens with these ideas, though, is that new technologies and better materials come along and make things possible that were not available when they were first conceived.’
Above: The mini maxi’s will be a good point of reference for the
technologies and methods used to design the sails for the AC36.
Clearly a big challenge facing the design teams for the next Cup cycle will be generating sufficient power to lift the monohulls onto their foils as early as possible. He who foils first in any given condition will reap huge benefits, so the design race is likely to concentrate heavily on the rig and sail plan.
Bouzaid doubts that a soft wing will achieve quite the same degree of control and efficiency as a multi-element hard wing of the sort seen in the past two America’s Cups, but he has no doubt it will be much more efficient than a conventional mainsail. ‘It will be interesting to see what evolves.’ As a cost-cutting measure the new America’s Cup rule is likely to ban tank testing of hulls and wind tunnel testing, the argument being that computer modelling and
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