based on a multihull, this time a ‘simpler’ 72ft catamaran. The hulls were tightly constrained, wing design slightly less so. Wing material was now limited to 380MPa ‘high-mod’ carbon. Consistent with the then current trends, the relatively open daggerboard rules anticipated curved C-shaped foils. Having set the rules, Team Oracle obviously had a strong leg up. Everything went along in a controlled, systematic design and build process. Then two events within a month of each
other in 2012 changed the whole game. First in early September Team New
Zealand’s cat was filmed foiling, an event that took the Defender (and the rest of the world, including me) by complete surprise. Not a month later, just starting to
experiment with barely functioning rudi- mentary hydrofoils themselves (T-foils attached to straight daggerboards), Oracle suffered a huge setback, catastrophically pitchpoling their catamaran in San Fran- cisco Bay, destroying the wing and damag- ing major portions of the hull. The tech - nical issues were never clear though the sailing implications of bearing away at too low a speed for the foils to properly lift the bow prompted the capsize; certainly the primitive foils would have exacerbated the crash. As a result, development was
42 SEAHORSE
The AC72s burst on the scene with dramatic looks and unprecedented performance. Today they look clunky and pedestrian – though USA 17’s destructive (left) pitchpole demonstrated the huge power-to-weight ratio of this new breed of sailboat. Boosted by the explosion in the foiler Moth class the AC72s launched the era of the flying multihull
delayed for four months while the US team feverishly went about rebuilding the boat and wing. Meanwhile, TNZ’s foil develop- ment proceeded rapidly. The story of New Zealand’s foil efforts
began with early tests on an SL33 cata - maran fitted with the C-foils anticipated by Oracle’s Cup Protocol. When testing, the C-foil equipped SL33 ‘reached a momentary sweet spot and almost began foiling’, recalled Glenn Ashby, who by now had moved to Team New Zealand and was working closely with all their players in designing, testing and sailing. In a ‘light bulb moment’ they added T-tips to the SL33’s daggerboards. The boat began to ‘fly’ for much longer and the immediate result was an ‘awesome increase in speed downwind, yet no noticeable penalty
upwind… It felt like we were pioneers!’ he said afterwards. Then later, when the much bigger AC72 began foiling, ‘it had frankly all become pretty surreal’. I had always thought that TNZ could
have won the Cup if they’d kept their foil- ing under wraps longer. But Ashby said that they perhaps could have put off being seen another week, max, but with all the spies out there it would have been imposs - ible to keep it secret. However, during all the New Zealand
foil development there were also crashes, where boats would be in full foiling mode, only to completely lose lift and spectacu- larly dive the hulls back into the water in a cloud of spray. With it would come a sudden loss of speed, or worse, a near- pitchpole of their own.
w
GILLES MARTIN-RAGET
ERIK SIMONSON/H20
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