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News Around the World


times VG winner Michel Desjoyeaux is even more severe: he says that the Vendée Globe is a pain in the ass every day. Retirements By day 35 of the race when the leading boats had passed Cape Leeuwin on the SW coast of Australia and the last boats Cape of Good Hope, on the south tip of Africa, six boats had retired from the race – five of them racing for a podium. After Corum was dismasted the second retirement was Hugo Boss. After a long repair by the British skipper to reinforce the bow


structure inside his VPLP design, which had been flexing badly, Alex Thomson resumed the race for a while before his team announced that he had starboard rudder damage… Hugo Bosswas lying 12th at the time and averaging 10kt. Nothing more was heard until the announcement that the damage could not be repaired and the boat was heading for Cape Town where Alex announced his retirement.


of cracking already evident in the structure around the bearings.’ Sam headed to Cape Town for repairs… However, after a few


days’ working with her team to reinforce the keel structure she set off again straight into the Southern Ocean, very much alone, well behind the fleet but determined to complete the course (she must retire from the race for receiving outside assistance) to raise as much money as possible for the children’s heart charity for which she races… Initiatives Coeur! The English skipper who now lives in Brittany is very brave. Patrice Carpentier


NEW ZEALAND In late November Emirates Team New Zealand completed the full suite of racing machines for the 36th America’s Cup with the launch of their second-generation AC75, Te Rehutai, following the earlier unveilings from the USA’s Team Magic, UK’s Team Ineos and Italy’s Challenger of Record, Prada Pirelli. The ETNZ event fulfilled much of the waterfront speculation that


their weapon would be radically different. But once the initial surprise gave way to a more studied appraisal, it became clear that their thinking had actually been hiding in plain sight for most of 2020. All the principal design features of their final raceboat were present in their 12m surrogate, Te Kahu, launched in January and very much in evidence during intense development and training work since. In a physical and chronological sense Te Rehutai is ETNZ’s Boat


Three. In a development sense it is more like Boat Four or Five. ‘They have pushed it very hard,’ notes commentator and former America’s Cup competitor Peter Lester. ‘They have jumped a couple of generations and there will be more to come.’ Says Glenn Ashby, mainsail trimmer: ‘It is definitely a big jump


from Boat One. In any development industry you typically have engineers working on the 2025 model while the 2021 model is rolling out on the showroom floor. We hope we have rolled out the 2025 model in 2021.’ Compared with the soft, fluid lines of Boat One, the new incar-


The clues were there. Team NZ’s half-scale Te Kahu was not only invaluable for practice while their first AC75 was caught up in Covid disruption but it was a remarkably accurate tell of what the team’s raceboat would look like. The mule’s forward shape lacks the concavities of raceboat Te Rehutai and has more V to the stern sections (maybe to partly mimic a skeg), but overall the approach with the use of completely flat panels reinforces what chief designer Dan Bernasconi tells Ivor Wilkins: by the time this boat was launched the raceboat design was largely locked down


Was the damaged rudder the real reason not to continue? Or


was there concern that the repair to the boat might not be robust enough to safely enter the Southern Ocean? We don’t know. Having lost the first Juan K design, Corum, to a rig failure the


second Juan K design, Arkea, which had been flying very nicely, hit a UFO (probably a cetacean) breaking the foil cassette away from the hull and leaving a big gap through which seawater was quickly flooding in. A quick inspection confirmed the damage was too serious to repair at sea and so skipper Sébastien Simon used his canting keel and ballast tanks to lay his boat over to limit the ingress of water before he too headed slowly for Cape Town and retirement. At the end of the same day Sam Davies also struck a UFO with


her keel when Initiatives Coeur was sailing at high speed. ‘I was already having a hard time with the front. There was 30kt of wind and I was going between 15 and 22kt in a very confused sea. The shock was like hitting a rock. The boat stopped dead and immediately there were loud cracking noises from the hull. ‘I flew and everything not tied to the boat flew with me. It was


violent and I really hurt my ribs. I went straight to the keel, I knew right away that it wasn’t the foil, but the keel, and there was a lot


24 SEAHORSE


nation is much more assertive, with harder more aggressive edges. From the more voluminous, flared bow, the hull transitions to high, slab sides and a hard chine before sloping down to a wide, squared- off transom. There is clearly more beam than on Boat One, which sees the foil arms – the axis of which is a fixed dimension under the rule – emerging more from under the hull than out of the sides. Most of these elements were present in the 12m mule Te Kahu,


highlighting the crucial role it played while the team’s first AC75 was ‘lost at sea’, as it voyaged to Europe and back for World Series regattas that fell victim to COVID-19 cancellations. ‘Te Kahu was indeed the forerunner to Te Rehutai and shares a lot of the same design concepts,’ ETNZ design chief Dan Bernasconi confirms. ‘Te Kahu was the future Te Rehutai in disguise! We designed Te Kahu with flat, developable panels for ease of build, but it also served to hide our thinking. ‘We totally viewed Te Kahu as the real Boat Two, enabling us


to have three generations of yacht in this campaign. It is well known that we’re strong believers in design-by-simulation, and building two boats before Te Rehutai was almost more about going through full design loops in all areas of the yacht, to the point of construction drawings, than it was about testing the concepts on the water. In fact, by the time Te Kahufirst hit the water we had already committed to the lines of Te Rehutai and were well into building the plug.’ Bernasconi says there was not much time to design the first boat


so the approach to the next two iterations was to start again with a clean sheet of paper. The result was that ‘five times as much R&D’ was committed to the final version, with much more focus on aerodynamics. As one of the principal authors of the AC75 rule, he said it was ‘weird’ to note that after teams spent months working to produce optimal boats for the rule ‘we end up with something completely unexpected’. He confessed that, in terms of aesthetics, there were mixed opinions about Te Rehutai. ‘But that is not a con- sideration. It is all about function and what we believe is fastest. ‘You learn to love it.’





RICHARD GLADWELL


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