News Around the World
Maxime Sorel and Antoine Carpentier on V&B are about to win the TJV – just 17 minutes ahead of Aymeric Chappelier and Arthur Le Vaillant who they passed in the final hours of the race. Both boats are Sam Manuard-designed Mach 40s built at JPS shipyard, V&B in 2015 and Chappelier/Le Vaillant’s Aïna Enfance in 2017 – but to a later iteration of Manuard’s consistently successful Mach 40 series
The foils protruding from each side of the hull will be ballasted
and will each weigh in the order of 1.5 tonnes. It is likely they will rotate in a single up-down plane from a fixed hull junction, with the ride height controlled by ailerons on the trailing edge of the T-wings. The main foils will be controlled by electric motors driving hydraulic pumps, although the possibility of an all-electric system is also under investigation. Cyclors and internal combustion engines will be outlawed. Pitch control is likely to be from a single fixed rudder with elevators
on the trailing edge of the wings, although a rake control or a com- bination of both remain possibilities. The expectation is that the boats will foil in 9kt of breeze and
be capable of racing up to 25kt. From simulations, speeds are claimed to be close to the AC50s and in some conditions faster. Displacement will be about 7 tonnes. In displacement mode the boats will be about as tender as a TP52 but with a much bigger rig. ‘In light airs they will still be exciting boats to sail and it will take a huge amount of skill to get them through the transition to foiling – which also poses an interesting hull design challenge.’ Hence, while there will be considerable areas of one-design to
contain cost, hull design stays open. ‘The hull shape is a significant area of development,’ explains Bernasconi. ‘Luna Rossa and we both wanted to bring the relevance of hull design back into the Cup. A big part of the design race will be about who can get on their foils first and who can accelerate fastest.’ Automation of the flight control, artificial intelligence and machine
learning technologies will be heavily constrained. ‘We want sailors, not computers sailing the boat. The rules will be drafted to achieve that as much as we can. ‘It is quite a difficult thing to construct rules that allow enough
freedom for innovation but still require sailors to sail the boat. In the last Cup the rules were written to exclude autopilots, for example. But teams found a way around that by effectively having an autopilot tell the sailors exactly what to do. The computer was heavily involved in maintaining the flight stability of the boat.’ The draft with both foils down in docking mode will be no greater
than 5m. The rig is under development but will feature ‘soft sail materials’ including code zeros for downwind legs. But the mainsail is likely to involve a twin-luff soft-wing set-up which creates a much more efficient airflow transition from spar to sail.
22 SEAHORSE ‘The other advantage is that a wing-type topology allows you to
control twist and camber along the length of the spar more accurately. Something the AC50s developed was control where the top of the wing was loaded in the opposite direction to the rest of the wing. This meant that when you wanted to depower in higher wind conditions the top of the wing could work in opposition to the bottom, which provided more drive force for the same roll moment.’ With the foils protruding from the sides, the AC75s have been
compared to medieval chariots with swords spinning from the wheels. Bernasconi acknowledges the safety issue but says it is not much different in reality from a multihull. The solution is likely to be an electronic diamond shape virtual boundary protecting the flanks. This will be visible to the helmsman, umpires and TV audi- ences on a display and penalties will be imposed for any penetration of the virtual zone. Bernasconi says this was already discussed with the AC50s.
‘We want to have good aggressive match racing but we don’t want collisions – no good result ever comes from a collision. With the virtual contact zone you can still push aggressively and put penalties on your opponent without that resulting in a physical collision. When you are talking about the speeds involved that makes a lot of sense!’ As to cost, ETNZ has long experience of struggling against
big-budget rivals and says it is committed to containing costs where possible with one-design elements, banning tank and wind tunnel testing, limiting two-boat testing and allowing teams to share designs. ‘We are acutely aware of the importance of keeping the costs
manageable,’ says Bernasconi. ‘The reality is that the America’s Cup is an expensive game and America’s Cup teams always find ways to spend more. Even if it was a 30ft displacement monohull the big teams would still spend vast amounts on R&D. ‘Even so, the cost of building the boat in the context of all the
other expenses, particularly personnel, is a relatively small propor- tion of the overall campaign cost. ‘It is important not to dumb this down too much. It is the America’s
Cup, you have to strike the right balance between attracting as many challengers as possible while keeping it at the pinnacle of sailing, with boats that are technologically impressive and the most exciting boats to sail. We have thought pretty hard about that.’ Ivor Wilkins
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JM LIOT
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