By the time the 2010 Deed of Gift Match began aerodynamic drag had moved front and centre in the America’s Cup. The more that USA 17 went sailing the more of these delicate fairings that she sprouted. The match was a walkover – the outcome put beyond doubt just five minutes into the first race: ironically it was Spithill who stalled his big tri with 90 seconds to go leaving Alinghi to sail away, but within five minutes Oracle sailing higher and faster had swept past the spidery Swiss cat. And that, as they say, was that
Missing piece – Part III
We conclude our serialisation of Learning to Fly – the Oracle 2010 America’s Cup story – with the largest wing sail that the world has (still) ever seen
Compromise The giant VPLP-designed trimaran USA 17 – soon to be nicknamed Dogzilla – rolled out of its purpose-built shed in Anacortes on 22 August 2008. Core Composites had completed the job in just nine months, an amazing accomplishment given the amount of ‘redirection’ required along the way. After three days of static load tests
ashore Melinda Erkelens smacked a bottle of champagne into the end of the bowsprit (risky business, as we shall see), and christened the boat BMW Oracle 90. For the Cup it would be changed to the more manageable USA 17, a nod to the late
58 SEAHORSE
Tom Blackaller, San Francisco Bay sailor extraordinaire whose twin-rudder 12 Metre USA was a challenger for the 1987 America’s Cup in Fremantle. On 1 September the 6,500ft2
mainsail
was hoisted for the first time up the 50m Hall Spars mast… and the crew immedi- ately went sailing. The sails had been built by Craig Phillips and a crew of 12 sail - makers at Oracle’s own loft in Minden, Nevada, near the North Sails 3Di plant. North manufactured the sail blanks on
its moulds, then they were trucked over to Oracle Racing for finishing. ‘We lucked into a great facility,’ says Phillips, produc- ing sails for his seventh America’s Cup programme. ‘We could lay out a gennaker with a 70m (230ft) luff length on our floor,’ Phillips says. ‘The gennakers were 8,500ft2
. We needed a dozen guys in the
loft because the sails were so heavy. You needed a guy behind you and a guy in front of you just to pull the work through
the sewing machine.’ Russell Coutts’s understatement prior
to casting off for the first time, that he found the boat ‘incredibly challenging’, drew smiles from his teammates. He said they’d proceed ‘conservatively’. A photo- graph from that day shows a reefed main in 6-8kt of wind. That is conservative. Meanwhile, Ian Burns and his perfor-
mance team were collecting data from more than 250 sensors covering all areas of the boat from rudders to sails, including fibre optic sensors built into the carbon structure. ‘Almost immediately we were considering different appendages,’ Drum- mond says, ‘and a taller rig. But the first change was new floats, longer, and with an improved shape for lower drag. Hervé Devaux tweaked the structures, so while the floats were bigger they were no heavier. ‘At the same time we were running
analyses on appendage configurations. The boat that was launched had a dagger-
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