Quiet confidence
During a fly-by in Barcelona fellow designer Rob Humphreys had an opportunity for a comprehensive catch-up with Emirates Team New Zealand’s surprisingly relaxed chief technical officer Dan Bernasconi. Surprisingly relaxed… at the time Bernasconi was barely halfway through the America’s Cup defence
Starting this with some context, Emirates Team New Zealand were 4-0 ahead three days ago, and 4-2 ahead yesterday, with Ineos Britannia implying a shift of momen- tum with their two out of two. Whichever way it pans out in the end it seems that both boats have the potential to win and excitement is super-charged. Today is a layday and whether the Kiwis feel under pressure or not I wouldn’t know, but I am a little surprised to receive an email first thing from Dan Bernasconi to say that he’ll be free to meet and suggests 11.30. Dan is the Chief Technical Officer of
Emirates Team New Zealand and I am keen to find out how the AC75 foiling monohull class came out of nowhere to kick off a dramatic new chapter in America’s Cup folklore, and more than
38 SEAHORSE
anyone Dan is the architect – conceptually, mathematically and effectively as rule director – of this unique class. I was involved in the America’s Cup
twice, once with a foiler that wasn’t ultimately allowed to compete, so I am in Barcelona sensing a bit of history; win or lose it’s probably about the strongest challenge we Brits have had in 173 years! But I am also here out of sheer curiosity to try to understand how the untested, unproven AC75 rule seemed to simply pop out of the woodwork. The racing has been sharp, brutal and
potentially full of jeopardy. Nigh on 40kt upwind in 9kt of breeze in a monohull still seems hard to get one’s head around. It seems that any performance short of perfec- tion allows the other boat to lever itself in, and nine times out of ten it seems that it’s the immediate pre-start that drives the agenda. Match racing as we had become used to
it was not necessarily expected of these boats. Of course, they’re monohulls rather than multihulls and we are pre-conditioned to thinking that monohulls are capable of operating in a more limited space, but foil- ing monohulls with an upper speed capa- bility knocking on 50kt would surely not provide the starting excitement that makes
a show rather than a procession. Wrong, it seems, so this is something remarkable. I start by asking Dan how much time he
can spare, expecting him to say five to 10 minutes in the wake of these two consecu- tive defeats. But he says about an hour and we go on for about 90 minutes, so ‘pressure’ seems notably absent. It hints at some inner confidence, whether shared by the team I don’t know because it’s just the two of us in one of the team’s meeting rooms. Whatever, it also gives a bit of time to explore the background to the AC75, and how Dan’s journey brought him there. So Dan is a Brit, brought up in Ashow, a
small village near Kenilworth. His first job, pre-university, was as a software engineer for IBM, developing from his childhood relationship with his ZX Spectrum computer, when he spent hours coding the physics of interactions between moving bodies like bats and balls, masses on springs. Already a technically proficient, inquisitive mind. He went on to read general engineering
at Churchill College, Cambridge and then spent the next three years at Arup, there- after being persuaded to join the McLaren F1 team where he specialised in perfor- mance prediction and optimising physical
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116 |
Page 117 |
Page 118 |
Page 119 |
Page 120 |
Page 121 |
Page 122 |
Page 123 |
Page 124
