This is all getting a bit medieval as a pair of competing Cowes Classic Week crews break into a jousting match during a boat-on-boat gybe. You would be forgiven for using a spinnaker system from the dark ages if you are racing a beautiful classic like this and you must, but for rulemakers who force such pain and suffering onto other harmless civilians we wish nothing but damp and darkness
The wind limits were just one part of the Match Conditions
announced in February. We’ve known since the Protocol came out in September 2017 that the America’s Cup Match and the Prada Cup Finals would both be first-to-seven-points, one point per race win. We’ve also known that they would race on a windward-leeward course with upwind starts. Now we know that there will be a 45-minute time limit on the
races in the Match. Yachts must be declared five days before the Match and may not be changed during the Match unless there is unintentional breakage. And, when declaring their yachts, competi- tors must include a schedule of parts to be used as replacements in case of breakage. Remember that in 2013 in San Francisco yachts were moded between races. Oracle had a different mea- surement certificate for every single one of the 19 races! We didn’t know for sure how many challengers there would be.
Now we know that Luna Rossa Prada Pirelli, New York Yacht Club American Magic and Ineos Team UK will be the only three teams in the Prada Cup. The Protocol specified multiple knockout and repechage rounds for the Prada Cup, with the winner of the AC World Series preliminary regattas getting a bye into the second round. Now we know that there truly are only three challengers. The
much simpler format for the early rounds of the Prada Cup tells us that. As this is written, there has been no announcement that Stars+Stripes has withdrawn, but the round-robin schedule for the Prada Cup only includes three teams in four rounds of three races. The top team from the round-robin advances to the Prada Cup Finals while the other two race a first-to-four-points repechage to determine the other finalist. The America’s Cup World Series kicks off in Cagliari on 23 April.
All four teams will be racing, with Defender Team New Zealand joining the three challengers. The competition will be all match racing – three days of match racing in a double round-robin, with
finals on Sunday. Races will be approximately 20 minutes long, with four races per day. The finals will be first-to-two-points. Shipping schedules now come into play, with less than 10 months
until the Prada Cup and less than a year until the Cup Match. ETNZ will lose about four months shipping their AC75 to and from Europe and a further few weeks when it’s in transit from Cagliari to Portsmouth. The Kiwis now have their 38ft test boat in Auckland, so they can continue testing foils and systems while waiting to get their AC75 back home, probably in September. Speculation is rife on when they will launch their second AC75.
They don’t need to race it in anger until the first race of the Match, 6 March 2021. All the challengers will move to Auckland some time after the
Portsmouth AC World Series in June. The general assumption is that the challengers will all laminate their Boat 2 hulls in their home country to meet the Protocol’s ‘constructed in country’ requirement, and then assemble and launch the boats in Auckland. Time is, unsurprisingly, very short. We learned a lot in February, but we still don’t know how the
teams will fare when they line up together in Cagliari. At least now we don’t have long to wait.
CupExperience.com
SCHHHH... – Terry Hutchinson ‘The boat goes quiet, Defiant lifts out of the water and in some ways we feel like we are pioneering a new area of the sport.’ That is a quote from American Magic helmsman Dean Barker and from position 4, aft grinder on the port side of Defiant, I can appreciate the words. In so many ways Dean is right that we are on the front side of
development. I have experienced boat speeds on Defiant that I SEAHORSE 13
INGRID ABERY
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