Rod Davis
Jumping the (development) curve
The America’s Cup picture is beginning to become a bit clearer now that the Kiwis and Ital- ians have unveiled the concept for the new AC75, the class that will be sailed in the 2021 event. Not crystal clear, mind you, because it’s only
a concept, and a massive amount of work, many times the work carried out for the concept, will
need to be done to turn this radical idea into reality and produce great racing. Just to write the rules without any ‘gaps’ that won’t need to be corrected later is a major undertaking. Watch out for ‘adjustments’ or changes to make it all work in the real world. All the old sayings come to mind: ‘the devil is in the detail’; ‘listen
with your eyes, not just your ears’ – bet you didn’t know that one! It’s not so old, in fact I just made it up, but it means ‘watch what they do, not what they say’. I have to be a bit careful in writing this as it can be very polarising
(the subject of choosing the boat for the Cup). Tradition vs ‘out there’. I am remaining open-minded at this point as to the merits of the new AC75. In polling terms I am undecided. We need to see a bit more information… and some more facts. The catchphrase from Team New Zealand in the last Cup, ‘throw
the ball out there as far as we can, then go get it’ was comprehen- sibly applied with this new boat. Whoever threw this ball can throw! So let’s have a look at the concept for the AC75 class and see
what we can figure out. I want to stick to the concept, more than the actual detail of the boat, as that is all we know at this point. What the Defender has come up with has to qualify as ‘out there’.
It’s a monohull, but in name only because it’s unlike any monohull that has come before it. Totally unlike. It looks more like some kind of startling creature that comes out after you turn over a rock. The kind that makes you jump back, but cool at the same time! The idea is a fully foiling monohull that is self-righting. Proclaiming
performance as good as the AC50s in some conditions; that will be a good trick in itself. See, foiling is far more efficient when the boat is light. At the same time, you need righting moment so the boat does not capsize before sailing fast enough to get on the foil. With me so far? Great! Catamarans get this righting moment
from the hulls being apart from each other. Monohulls, both big and small, use hull shape to an extent, but really most of their righting moment comes from the crew hiking out and/or lead at the
32 SEAHORSE
bottom of a keel. Swinging keel or not, it’s the same idea of weight and levers to counter the wind on the sails. So the new AC boat designers and engineers are faced with a
conundrum – how do we make the new AC75 class super-light to foil, but keep it from tipping over before it goes fast enough to get up on those foils? Since you can’t always, and be assured that it will happen, you need a plan B. There is, and plan B is… a class rule that the boat must be able to right itself after a capsize. Hmm, that is going to be fun! The engineering challenges to make the foils rotate through 130°,
be strong enough to lift the boat out of the water and make it foil with 1,000kg of ballast in each one, while not being insurmountable will take some very clever people on each of the teams and a whole lot of work. Hydraulics are the obvious answer, but fed by grinder, pedal
power or a motor? Is a motor a good thing or bad? Lots of racing boats use them nowadays. My guess is motors are good as there will be no other way to do it in a repeatable way required for all the tacks and gybes in a match race. A few of the early notions mentioned in the original suggestions
about the class for this next Cup have fallen by the wayside. The debate between the boats we sail today and boats that are ‘out there’ has obviously led to a decision to go radical. Close match racing and match racing starts? Can’t really see
that happening in any kind of sense we have seen before. As Spock might say from the bridge of the Enterprise, ‘Captain, it’s match racing, but not as we know it’. The expense of a 2021 America’s Cup campaign will be way up
there. Open hull design, foil design and engineering, open sail designs, all within the concept of something that has never been done before. And you get to do it twice as each team will have to have two boats
to be competitive: one for 2019 and a second one for 2020 and 2021. The chances your first boat will be so good you can win the Cup are, frankly, zip. That will make the budgets for the AC50 ‘one- design’ cats from the last Cup in Bermuda look like chump change. But with the ball being thrown out there really far, there will be
the trickledown of technology to the yachting community – albeit in a decade of so. Look how many foiling boats are around now, vs how many were around in 2013 when foiling was started in the
MAX RANCHI
KEN HIVELY
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