When the music stops (where will you be?)
Four races gone in the Prada Cup final and another poorly timed Seahorse deadline arrives. The editor asked me to look back at what we have seen so far… First off, proof that predicting the out-
come of yacht racing is a fool’s errand, the transformation from peacock to feather duster for American Magic was brutally quick. They join a small, select club of teams who leave the competition without registering a single race win. This is a terrible place to be – no matter how good you looked, how clever you thought you had been, it doesn’t amount to a hill of beans. The disappointment never leaves you,
most days it’s an itch you can’t scratch, but when the Cup’s in progress it’s a bad case of gunwale bum. This isn’t like losing the FA Cup or the F1 World Championship. There is no date on the calendar you can ring as the start of your comeback. No one knows when, or where, or what
in, the next Cup will be sailed. Will the team survive, will the courts get involved again? You are done and there may be no second chance.
48 SEAHORSE American Magic were undone by a
simple mistake that would normally have resulted in a mast in the water episode. But ‘gravity is a stern mistress’ (epithet cour- tesy of a teammate who arrived at the morning meeting with the skin missing from half his face after a big night) as American Magic found to their cost. It looked a relatively benign re-entry
from the flying incident, but the fates aligned so that the hull hit the water at exactly the right angle to create a huge slamming pressure peak that stove in the hull shell. This was a load case no one had foreseen, nor could they, and if they had it was impossible to design against without the boat being hopelessly overweight. Fixing the structure was the easy bit.
Fixing the electronics and power trains is trickier; this is not just a case of nipping to Halfords for a few cans of WD40. The control boxes and the prime movers can be replaced, but the wiring is more problem- atic. Almost certainly this will have been a rally car-style loom, built and tested on the bench and installed as one piece into the
boat. There was no spare for this, nor time to build a replacement. You are relying on it being waterproof,
but that’s a forlorn hope, the salt water is sneaky. The loom will continue to suffer degradation for weeks as the salt works its mischief, basically opening the way for intermittent faults. Not a recipe for a relaxed spell on the helm, and they never had time to get their mojo back. After the first two days of racing in the
Prada Cup Ineos find themselves badly behind in the count at 0-4. The sluggish- ness at take-off has not completely gone away. But once the breeze is up they can match Luna Rossa for pace at times. In previous America’s Cups the teams
could tweak the appendage configuration to suit the day’s forecast. For example, in Bermuda in 2017 you could choose which daggerboards to use on the morning of the race, provided you declared the config - uration and got a certificate by 10am. Under the current Cup Protocol the boat configuration is frozen at the start of the race series. Ineos will have upgrades in the shed but you can’t use them until you win another seven races. My guess is that most of the pundits in
Auckland would choose Luna Rossa as the boat to sail. Ineos’s scope for a further injection of performance is now quite lim- ited. It looks to me that the only variable points of differentiation are in the sail choices and designs. But given that Ameri- can Magic’s experiments with a small mainsail were unsuccessful and the jib is mainly there to carry the tell-tales, it feels
PHOTOS GILLES MARTIN-RAGET
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