Left: focusing on the war and not the battles saw the America’s Cup finally return to New Zealand after two near-misses in 2007 and 2013. Emirates Team New Zealand finished solidly mid-fleet in the AC World Series leading into the 2017 Cup, but at that stage they only had eyes for perfecting the foils and the innovative control system they had literally invented for the AC50 which helped them to win the 35th Cup at a canter. In fact, Team NZ worked very little on racing techniques until arriving in Bermuda – the last challenger to do so. But if your sailors are good enough then learning to race a new boat is not going to be such a big deal. Meanwhile, squeaky bum time for 2021 Cup teams with their first AC75s diverging so dramatically (above). More will be revealed in Sardinia next month but the novel shape of the deeply veed new Team NZ mule Te Kahu – boat 1.5 – certainly didn’t help nerves among rival technical teams
Do we agree? Do we have mental toughness to finish third out of four in regatta one, or worse, to play the longterm game? We see lots of heads nodding in agreement. But one notable
exception is the shore team boss, Jimmy. Jimmy (whose name has been changed to protect his true identity) has won the Cup before. ‘You guys are treating this like an Olympic campaign, with one or two people, but it’s not. This is the America’s Cup. ‘We have 100 people, and I am asking them to put in 70 hours
a week, every week. We need points on the board from day one. Not all the points, but enough to maintain the passion and to believe in the dream. That is why our team will work crazy hours with ded- ication and spirit, because of passion and belief… don’t underes- timate that.’ Many of the nodding heads, mine included, turn to a grimace.
Jimmy is right, at least partially. How do we do both? Can we keep our cards close to our chest and have a good peek at the competition and still get points on the board? Two regattas maybe, thus we should plot plans for both. One for
the first regatta in Cagliari, and adjust for the second regatta six weeks later in England? That might work well, as we assess where we are via the other
teams, in regatta one, then make adjustments and improve for regatta two. All 100 team members will love improvement! Vote? Looks like we have a consensus. So great, here we go.
The win Right, how do we achieve our definition of a win? First, how about we don’t use our best foils and sails. We will use the second best of our lot. Then we give away very little to the other teams. Of course for this plan to work we need to know exactly how much better our best sails and foils perform over the second-string ones. That is how we can assess where we are in terms of performance. The other part is our learning from the other teams. Spies, and lots of them, and good ones too. The key to spying is knowing what you
are looking for. Spying is not about clicking 10,000 pictures in the hope something pops out of it. It is about getting a picture of a foil at just the perfect angle that we can measure the size, sweep and section shapes. Because that means we can copy it if we want to. Of course we need to be clever too, because the other teams might
be doing the same as we are, in keeping our best stuff in the closet. We will need to compare the photos from their previous training sessions to see what is in the closet and what is being used. Send a memo to our spy team: ‘have you got your act together?’
The pressure is going to come on your team in a big way during these regattas. Also, all the sailing team not racing are now part of the spy team
to note and define the others’ sailing techniques, sail set-ups, lift- off speeds and so on. We better be a slick act here because we have two chances to learn from the other teams and then it’s back into our respective caves for six months. War room heads are nodding again, ‘and you two, writer and reader,
(that is you and me), are you two on the same page as the rest of us?’ Everyone should fully understand that these regattas are ours to ‘win’ if we are a slick act. Winning is 30 per cent planning, 10 per cent luck and 100 per
cent execution. All agreed, great! End of war meeting. Jimmy pipes up again: ‘By the way, what are those Kiwis up to with
that funny-looking surrogate boat!?! Chines, veed in the back, funny bow, crazy thing it is. ‘They are trying to sell that bullshit line it was cheaper to build that
way, typical line from Team New Zealand, complain about money when they want to hide something.’ I reckon they are thinking ‘flying not sailing’. Maybe they are hoping
to use the ground effect like a pelican or albatross does. That would be their usual ‘out of the box’ thinking. Never mind, too late for us, we have already started to build our
final boat. Keep the faith…
q SEAHORSE 31
FRANÇOIS CHEVALIER
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