By day two of the opening series of informal practice races it was only Prada who came out to play with Team New Zealand. By day three all of the challengers stayed ashore leaving Pete Burling’s slightly bemused crew alone on the racecourse and practising their starts against a chase boat. Surely those who watched the handful of early skirmishes were already crossing their fingers that there was serious sandbagging going on by the visitors? Incredible as it reads, this is a rare shot of Defender plus rival in the same camera frame, such was the superiority – whether real or contrived – of the Cup holders. There are good technical and sporting reasons why many expect the Cup to be defended in March, perhaps easily, but surely few anticipated the scale of the apparent performance difference when they first met in anger?
to make it more real, make sure it’s raining when you do! That way you can have the effect of the water hitting your face. Hurts, doesn’t it? Aerodynamic goggles might be good idea!
And that is why the decks of the boats are looking like Formula 1 cars. Kinda cool, though. Keeping the crew low and out of the wind is such a big deal, most of the sailors don’t even change sides when the boat tacks.
Downforce: with all this wind flying over the deck there is an opportunity to use it to push the boat down, which would increase its righting moment. Everyone knows that more righting moment equals more speed. This is something all the teams have been onto from day one. (In the previous Cup in 50ft catamarans a negatively raked windward rudder foil performed the same task, holding down the weather hull).
Righty-oh: the last thing we are going to look at is the wings that make the boat fly. The wings don’t get the attention that hulls and decks do, probably because they are not in your face as much. But in this next Cup that is where much of the game will be played. And there is no consensus on the wing shape among the teams. None, nada, nyet.
The basis of AC wing design is to make it as small as they can be, but have enough area to get the boat to flying in the minimum wind limit for the racing, which is 6.5kt. In this case ‘smaller’ can mean shorter, thinner, or both. Simply put, smaller wings are less drag but less lift.
Each team is required to declare which wings they are going to use several days before racing starts. So they can’t afford to paint themselves into a corner with specialised wings. Getting the boat up and flying is a combination of wing size, hull shape (bustle and so on) sail area and crew technique. They all come together and work… or don’t.
Take-off speed for an AC75 is roughly between 16 and 18kt. As the hull rises out of the glue, and starts to fly, the boatspeed will shoot up to 25-30kt.
Where it gets quite tricky is that there will be lots of tacking forced by the boundaries of the racecourse. The teams will have to keep or get the boat foiling through eight to 10 tacks in each race. If your team can’t foil out of a tack, and the other team can, it’s time to get a cold beer and change the channel to the cricket. It is very much open season on what the foils should look like. Some teams use a torpedo at the root of the wings, others don’t. The angle the wings come off the arms is different for each team. Wing position fore and aft of the arm varies. All the wings have flaps at the back of the section, just like an aeroplane. The more you know the more you see. Wing length, thickness, angle off the arm, torpedo or not, funny little fences, wing tips and gadgets make ‘wing watching’ a sport within the sport of the modern America’s Cup. Personally, I think wings could be the biggest single factor in winning the Cup.
I did not mention sails. At this point it seems all the teams have come to pretty much the same conclusion. Flat sails sheeted hard seem the way to go. Oh surprise! Hard to know really, but we can look at that next time.
It will be a strange Cup. No match racing, at least as we know it; a boat that can’t be sailed without the computers working; and crewed by ‘sailors’ who have never sailed before they joined the team. I was not the biggest fan of the new boats two years ago. But I am coming around.
The more I study them the more interesting they are. In a science experiment kind of way.
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