Cut!
The excitement and theatre of the 35th America’s Cup are over, the fans and supporters have enjoyed their victory, or got over their defeat… The investors and sponsors are enjoying the spoils of victory, or working out if this thing really is such a good idea. In the technical community a lucky few have the 36th America’s Cup in the subject lines of their inboxes, the rest jockey for position and opportunity with likely challengers. In short, it’s business as usual. This is a
tricky time for teams who sought to use the America’s Cup as a basis for a sustainable business, but the America’s Cup is the ultimate ‘winner takes all’ trophy. That was what the writers of the Deed of Gift wanted, and history has shown that it’s difficult to disengage the competition from this rather anachronistic and challenging model. So the cycle has started again and that
means waiting in an information vacuum while the enthusiasm for the Cup wanes and fans are left asking when is the next Cup? Some see this as a terrible way to treat your new fan base – but that’s the event. The new Defender, Emirates Team New
The capsize against BAR in the Challenger Series was widely expected to knock back both the confidence and performances of ETNZ; the reality was different, the biggest cost was to a development programme that ran at full speed right into the Cup Match
‘We came quite late into our rudder and
elevator development. Most of the devel- opment of the test boat was around foils rather than rudders, which meant we did not have a lot of opportunity to get our rudder and elevator combinations right. In fact, if our race rudders had not worked out we would not have had a second chance to get them right. In the event, how- ever, they made a big difference.’ Another feather in Gomboc’s cap. In any design narrative one hopes for a
eureka moment when the gods offer a sur- prise gift out of the blue. Bernasconi shakes his head sadly. ‘It was more a case of believing in the tools and being prepared to spend significant R&D looking at options.’ If the gods did offer some assistance, it
was in the weather. The ETNZ package worked well across the wind range, but seemed most potent in the light-medium wind range, about 7-12kt. For once the reality matched the statistics and Bermuda lived up to June expectations. ‘This time round the wind gods paid back what they took from us in San Francisco.’ More importantly, from lessons learnt in
San Francisco an early commitment was made to pursuing improvement all the way through to the end and they achieved that. Bernasconi believes the team, as it was
42 SEAHORSE
when it arrived in Bermuda – long after most others and having spent the New Zealand summer training alone – would have had little chance of winning the Cup. ‘The performance gain in Bermuda in
terms of competitiveness was a big number, somewhere between 5 and 10 per cent. ‘A 10 per cent performance gain in a
20-minute race is two minutes faster. That is massive. Certainly the boat developed throughout that time in Bermuda, but more significantly the sailors got extremely good at working out how to get the best out of their craft.’ For Bernasconi, who admits to being a
jittery spectator during racing, the sweetest moment came in the first downwind leg of the final race of the Match. Trailing off the startline, ETNZ rounded Mark One behind Oracle and then surprised the Americans with what the team were first to label (and perfect) a ‘no-look gybe’ – gybing the boat with nobody signalling intent by moving across the boat. ‘To be able to control the wing, the foil
drop and the rake without anybody cross- ing to the other side – then to soak lower and faster on the foils to overtake – embod- ied everything our unique set-up allowed us to do. It was a very sweet moment.’ Ivor Wilkins
Zealand, have accepted a challenge from Circolo della Vela Sicilia and have gone into ‘Protocol Purdah’. In the coming weeks they will hammer out a mutually acceptable agreement that outlines the terms and conditions of the next Match and how the event will be run. It’s a massive task: marketing and media rights, dates and venues, terms for other chal- lengers, arbitration arrangements and so on. Typically a document of 100-plus pages and any other potential challenger is stymied until it is published. Who knows, a few months’ mature consideration by the Defender and Challenger of Record might spawn an even better event. On the upside for those on the sidelines
the unhappy possibility of legal action during this fallow period will probably be avoided, because two well-established yacht clubs and management teams are involved. A legal challenge to the published
Protocol has happened twice in my career, the litigation always touted as being ‘to protect the integrity of the Cup’ by forcing the Defender to comply more closely with the Deed of Gift. In reality these challenges were only intended to force the Defender into a Match against a single challenger. This gave that challenger direct passage to the Cup Match, without having to beat other challengers first. While it’s happen- ing the time spent in the courts is hugely frustrating but on both recent occasions the face of the Cup changed for the better. w
CHRIS CAMERON/DPPI
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