News Around the World
Having used it during the early rounds, Oracle continued into the first America’s Cup weekend with a single cyclor in the back of the bus for tactician Tom Slingsby. After four straight defeats the pedals came off, ostensibly in a weight-reduction programme (although more than one competitor expressed scepticism about taking an overweight boat into the America’s Cup). Probably more pertinent was how Slingsby’s cyclor left him high in the airflow along with the rest of the winch-grinding team while their New Zealand rivals were all neatly tucked down into a sort of extended human teardrop – with Pete Burling cooly seated in the back as the trailing edge
We were up against a team that certainly at the start of their
campaign was pretty underfunded – they weren’t able to get on the water as much as they’d wanted so they were a team that were going to go wide and take some high-risk options. For us as a defender it was tricky; we had to cover against all challenging teams, so how much do we try to match ETNZ, as we had heard that all the other challengers were going with standard grinding pedestals. Obviously the engineering needs to be decided very early on, and
if our intel on ETNZ was wrong we could have been in trouble; so in the end it became too high-risk to go with cycling. All credit to ETNZ to go with that and make it work. SH: Which teams were you concerned about? TS:We were always pretty confident against BAR. Obviously we had people watching Ben and his team. His boathandling was a long way behind and we believed his speed was a long way behind before he got to Bermuda. But across the Cup BAR were the most improved in boathandling by far – they were a very clean team by the end, but they couldn’t make up the speed deficit. As regards the Kiwis, we took plenty of video footage in NZ and
alarm bells started going off in November 2015 when they were on their test boat and we saw they had the GameBoys up and working. I flew to Auckland in November 2015 to eyeball this for myself and try to verify what was going on; I remember sending back an email to anyone who mattered at Oracle saying, ‘We have a big problem. If we raced ETNZ today there is a big chance they would win.’ The software ETNZ had developed was spectacular. SH: And with just a big chase boat as their opposition on the water in Auckland… TS: There was very little speed testing done in that campaign, it was all about developing a good package and boathandling was pretty much it. We couldn’t really speed test in Bermuda as it was too small and shifty, but I saw that ETNZ were onto something by how well they controlled the boat. SH: How good was your boat at Oracle? TS: Our boat was very good. It was complicated but in a different way. For example, our hydrofoils were permanently being modified, we could change each flap and tip on the boards, and of course alter which foils we used.
22 SEAHORSE With our rudders we had different elevators with different flex
characteristics, so for each day’s Cup racing our spec sheet had probably 15 decisions to be made with foil choice; long tip, short tip, big flap, intermediate flap, small flap, plus with the rudders; intermediate rudder with small elevators with more flex, less flex – and so some very complex combinations. But we had this all in our heads at the time. Amazing boats really, you could simplify them a lot and they would still be pretty amazing. SH: Who made the final call on what to use? TS: Myself and Jimmy. We represented the sailing team and we listened to the sailors’ input, and the guys trusted us to make the call on which configuration to run with each day. We would meet our weather guy Juan Villa, plus Grant Simmer and shore crew Andrew Henderson and discuss how we wanted to mode the boat that day. We never made a wrong configuration call, but in the end nothing we had on our shelf could match the Kiwis. SH: Did you break much gear? TS: We did, a lot of foils over the time we were in Bermuda, but rarely through a structural failure. Most often it was hitting something in the water, debris, and this would cause a crack, and as soon as it loaded up again it would break. SH: On a personal level who did you expecially enjoy working with? TS: It’s tough to single out an individual. Jimmy and I shared an office and we were pretty close, and so I learned a huge amount about how to run a team and how the game is played. Jimmy is unbelievably cool under pressure and just seeing how he deals with stuff, media, everyday issues in a team, like people not getting along and how he and Grant [Simmer] would quash that really fast. That was always an eye-opener. Paul Bieker has a beautiful mind really, he is a mad scientist and
in hindsight we contained him too much, we didn’t let his free thinking run wild and that was an error on our part. Another guy was Dimitri Despierres, a French designer who ran our systems, I would go to him with a problem and he would never say no, he would think about it and come back. I really enjoyed working with guys who never used the word no – people who were creative in solving a problem. SH: Franck Cammas had a terrible injury on a GC32 in training. Anything happen with you guys?
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GILLES MARTIN-RAGET
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