After success with the giant Godzilla trimaran in the Deed of Gift Match of 2010, Braun stayed with the USA team for another two Cup cycles, first with the 2013 event in San Francisco (opposite), raced in the breathtaking but by today’s standards not actually all that fast AC72 foiling cats. His experience with Oracle in the AC72s would be (almost but not quite) mirrored 10 years later in Barcelona – the big US cat struggling against Team New Zealand’s more developed challenger before getting faster and faster to recover from eight races down to defend the Cup. Then come the 2017 Cup, now in more similar boats again (below left), and the Oracle group was found wanting against the innovative thinking of a resurgent Team New Zealand and a brilliant new young generation of foiling talent. Credit to Braun’s powers of perception, as well as to the selling skills of Sir Ben Ainslie, that after the relative ignominy of the second Ineos-backed Challenge in Auckland in 2021 (above) the first in the new AC75 foiling monohulls, this in-demand sail designer saw enough potential to sign with the next UK challenge in Barcelona. A not very smart call it seemed for many long months… until it was
personality-wise, plus all the technical stuff. And that can be overwhelming. Other things mask that, you can sort of
brute-force it. Maybe we tried a bit of that for Barcelona. But if you have the funding and the continuity, then you have some- thing that can really work. One question I get asked a lot is why
and how we were improving so rapidly towards the end. At the beginning of the Louis Vuitton you’d say we were probably at the bottom of the pack… Actually, whatever they tell you I don’t think anyone has a clear idea of the whole picture. How- ever, when we went into the Louis Vuitton semi-finals we really started asking ques- tions about sailing our own boat, more than comparing ourselves with what others were doing. I think we’d been plagued by the comparison game as opposed to focus- ing on our game. That’s not entirely fair, but the balance was too much looking at others and not enough at ourselves. Then once we got racing we started
focusing on ourselves more and that I think made a big difference in the boat’s performance. American Magic had their challenges with the cyclors, the recum- bents. With Prada I’m not sure if they ran
out of ideas or what happened, but it would be interesting to see why they were so much better than us for so long and then we beat them. Getting to know sailing the boat: how
do you sail it better… what do I need to get my head out of the boat and look around the racecourse for… or what do I need to sort out whatever the objective is? There are an infinite number of objectives, but pick a few that actually make you bet- ter and quicker around the racecourse and just focus on those. The crew layout on these boats is a
mirror-image. All the sailors do the same job on each tack, so the guy on the wind- ward side drives the boat, the guy on the leeward side trims, and when the boat tacks the opposite happens. I don’t know how all the boats are configured, but for sure on all the AC75s whoever is on the leeward side has a nice view of the water – and not much else. You really have very little idea of what’s going on! That’s where sailing these boats is
extremely difficult. So the more you can have done automatically the better, then it gives you the opportunity to look around for the next shift or whatever, and the
more time you have to do that the higher the probability of getting it right. End of the day it’s just a sailboat race so
if you jumped on the boat and looked at the water in the middle of the race, as opposed to being able to have looked at it for the whole time leading up to that point, you’d probably make different decisions. It’s just what they see on the water for the most part, they do not have any of those magic things that are on the TV screen. In my speciality, sail development, it is
now very different from how it used to be and not just because of the boats – the new materials and manufacturing techniques are incredible. But if you need to make a new sail today it will generally take six to eight weeks because the sails need to cure; you might be able to get it down to four weeks, but it would be a stretch. By which time most of the racing is done. So you have to plan, to have a good idea what you want: for the main we used in the America’s Cup we had to commit at the beginning of August to get it for October. Not like the ACC monohulls, where
you had six-hour headsails and a stack of new ones waiting for you ashore ready to roll… Everything is different now!
q SEAHORSE 51
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