What are the options? Team New Zealand have to square the circle between the clear Italian preference for a monohull, and the prevailing mood that if it doesn’t foil it’s old-fashioned. It’s a big moment… the new class needs to be attractive enough to be used for several Cup cycles, regard- less of who wins, since readily available secondhand hardware is the key ingredient to keeping costs down for new teams. One of the chief advantages of being Defender and Challenger of Record is that you can know what the next class rule looks like long before revealing it to the other challengers. To some extent New Zealand may have blown their cover in terms of what the next Cup yacht might look like…
The prototype of the next-generation Volvo Ocean Race yacht has been unveiled in Lisbon. This was designed by some of the major players in the Emirates Team New Zealand brain trust, designer Guillaume Verdier
and engineer Dan Bernasconi
among them. The Volvo management are talking of a foiling monohull that can also be reconfigured to meet the Imoca 60 class rule after a keel, rudder and rig swap. Can the Cup be raced in this sort of boat? Of course you can race the Cup in anything that floats. Where I can see a foil- ing monohull, I can’t see a solid wing sail. The boats will have a wing mast with soft sails. One area where you could enhance performance would be to explore double- surface sails, such as inflatable luff jibs which add performance with little cost.
Such tweaks away from the traditional look would give areas of development that are visible to the spectators and pundits, not hidden below decks. They might also throw out the odd bit of trickledown to other types of sailing.
To make this concept work the issue of stored power and ride height control will have to be tackled in a more rational way than previously. Sailing is a physical sport, if something needs moving human muscle power does it. There are separate speed records
for big boats with powered
winches but they are somewhat infra dig. The AC Class catamarans did not get this right; it’s worth exploring why to highlight some of the considerations facing the writers of the new class rule.
When Emirates Team New Zealand first foiled in San Francisco it was in a class where the measurement rules were written to make foiling a non-viable solution. Thanks to clever covert development they circumvented this, but it created a boat that was very hard to sail.
The foiling configuration was only marginally stable. You needed a constant flow of large volumes of hydraulic fluid to keep the boat flying because the hydrofoil angle of attack could only be adjusted by rotating the whole daggerboard and rudder. This meant you were moving large heavily loaded components to make fine adjustments to the lift. Unfortunately after the San Francisco Cup these shortcomings were not addressed – the rules that gave rise to the configuration of the 72ft
catamarans were simply copied and pasted into the rule for the new boats. While a lot of time was invested in making the platforms and wing one- design, in the interests of cost control, by not tackling these clumsy foiling systems enormous costs were added.
The new boat fell between two stools. We want manual power generation because that’s the ethos of the sport, but you had to have some ‘stored energy’ as a safety net. The fixed-geometry foils and having no passive ride height control left the crew struggling to keep that safety net intact. If the class rule had permitted a Moth-like system, in other words ride height control using flaps on the foils, then the burdens on the grinders/‘cyclors’ would have been reduced and a safer, less edgy boat would have developed. Chapeaux to the ETNZ cyclors and systems guys, they built on their 2013 experience to develop a new controls package that gave their sailing team a massive edge. This was something new, an America’s Cup where the key performance differentiator was systems.
So that’s it, the next America’s Cup Match will be in Auckland in February 2021 in foiling monohull sloops that are 70ft long. Hopefully they will capture the effortless speed and apparent simplicity of the Moth. On the other hand, having seen the J-Class yachts in Bermuda, no one would balk at using these for the Cup. And it would put a huge smile on the face of Tom Whidden and Ken Read!
SEAHORSE 45
Co-hosted by
Partners & exhibitors
Event management
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88
