Opposite: JB Braun’s ‘other’ employer for the most recent America’s Cup was Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s Ineos – although, with the British team out for the next edition, perhaps it’s time to start shopping around once again. Then again, after seven full America’s Cup cycles this talented sail designer and engineer could be forgiven for kicking back and simply enjoying his principal role as head of design at North Sails. In an impressive feat of development the Ineos entry in Barcelona went from a likely early exit to making it through to the Match, a much happier run than Braun’s first Cup experience with Ed Baird’s Young America in Auckland in 2000…
had different areas. The bigger foil took off at 18kt, but was limited at its top end because it had the onset of cavitation and more drag. The Kiwis said, well, we’re going to give away our low end to take off at 21kt, but we’re going to have a superfast boat when we get going. So now they needed to make their aerodynamic package able to get to 21kt more quickly than the Italians could get to 18kt. These are the trade-offs that as a design team you recognise and evaluate, then you decide where you want to be. But again, it all hangs on the tools. In broad design terms the Kiwis are still
the best example of ‘throwing it out there’, to borrow their vernacular, and commit- ting 120 per cent to their chosen path. ‘We’ve made the call, now go at it and never look back.’ In Barcelona it was so impressive that almost 30 years since they won the Cup for the first time, in 1995, Team New Zealand was still the most focused of all the teams. I think the fact that they’ve been doing it
for such a long time – and with essentially the same core group – gave them a head- start. These boats are extremely compli- cated, especially how you sail them, so the feedback on what you can measure and how you use that data to help sail or trim the boat is super-critical. Here again the Kiwis excelled with their well-honed onboard communication. Another example: if you turn your
AC75 one way or another something happens to the attitude of the boat or the boat state, and then what do you do with that information? Do you do something with the control system because the helm turns or do you leave it alone? And then
true high-speed VMG solution. If I have the fastest boat that I can’t control I can learn how to control it. However, if I can control the high-speed boat to 92 per cent of its efficiency and the other only ever gets up to 90 per cent… then the faster, uncon- trollable boat will win. Trying to figure out those things is
extremely difficult, and I think the Kiwis have done a better job of identifying such items and then having the confidence to really focus on them. I’d say that at Ineos we needed another
you have to be able to describe what you ‘see’ to the technical team. That feedback loop depends on easy comms between the sailors and between the sailors and every- one else. As of course does controlling a big, heavy foiling yacht that left to its own devices would hurtle out of control in the blink of an eye. You can control all these different
functions in a systematic way based on user input, but the difficulty is to identify the inputs that matter because it gets cloudy as to what actually helps performance… You try to identify the ones that are
most important but then what does most important mean? You might say the most important thing is VMG, either upwind or downwind. However, you might also say ‘sail-ability’ which may be opposed to a
six months to work on those objectives. Getting started six months earlier, or not have so many delays. Then again if you started six months earlier often you still only learn what to focus on at the very end! How do you replicate that early on when you don’t necessarily know what to look for or look at? Towards the end things become clearer but then it’s too late. Working closely with the Mercedes F1
team this time round was also interesting and I think that towards the end we had developed a way of working together well. A positive was the manpower and the ability to analyse things in a structured way that was organised, methodical and gave really good results. The challenge was being able to move fast and adapt quickly. Everyone is trying to understand the
dynamics and then model them accurately enough to get results that are believable… People do not tank test these days, and the America’s Cup does not really allow it. Most of what was done in the past in tank testing is now completed with CFD. We were with Mercedes F1, and Alinghi was working with Red Bull.
SEAHORSE 47
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