Above: Grant Dalton embraces the least-recognised hero of Team New Zealand. Born in Canada, educated in Italy and resident in Monaco, Matteo de Nora joined the team in 2001 founding the ‘Mates’ supporters’ group. After the team’s humiliation at the hands of Alinghi in 2003, De Nora stepped up decisively to keep the now demoralised and near-penniless group going. De Nora has steadily increased his involvement and has now been team principal for more than 10 years. He was a major contributor to the rescue and relief efforts after the Christchurch earthquake of 2011, the same year he was made a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit, for services to the country’s America’s Cup campaigns and for his medical research in the field of neurology. Is Team NZ the tightest sailing team ever (left) as well as the best? The day after defending the America’s Cup and a long evening of celebrations, most of Dalton’s second, larger family could be found clearing out offices, packing up equipment and sweeping the base ready to fly home
elements of the car. Both surprisingly and ironically he wasn’t that interested in cars and – rather amusing to hear – often turned up on a Monday morning not knowing who had won over the weekend. Nevertheless, he became an important cog in the design and engineering environment there, and bearing in mind the security this offered it was a bold call to up-sticks after six years to pursue a new and uncertain career path. Interested in boats and the marine envi-
ronment, his fairly unique skillset tended to point towards the America’s Cup and its highly valued R&D intensity. After push- ing out his CV in 2004 the only positive response he got was from the Alinghi team; ironically, New Zealand turned him down, with Tom Schnackenberg sending a nice reply suggesting that he stick with cars… Alinghi weren’t able to offer him a paid
role but encouraged him to work towards a self-funded PhD in sail aerodynamics under the supervision of North Sails’ Michael Richelsen, there in charge of Alinghi’s CFD programme. Dan com- pleted his doctorate a year ahead of schedule and in so doing made it to Valen- cia to take on performance analysis for United Internet Team Germany, for the last of the ACC America’s Cups in 2007. For the following campaign Dan
secured a spot on the payroll at Alinghi as they prepared for the Deed of Gift defence against Oracle in Valencia, becoming the VPP lead and foil designer. It was here that
he met and worked with Jean-Claude Monnin and Mark de Gids, subsequently to team up on their Gomboc project… of which more later. Jean-Claude had developed an embryonic
match-race simulator for Alinghi’s 2003 challenge – something of a harbinger for what was to follow in the gestation of the AC75 – while Mark’s data analysis experi- ence provided the means of handling the vast data streams of a modern America’s Cup yacht, working towards a valuable graphical user interface that would make that data more digestible. Both these Gomboc partners were later to
follow Dan into the ETNZ environment and, while Gomboc itself has continued to develop within the New Zealand AC team, it is now also available as a product on the open market. Despite Alinghi’s efforts that Deed of
Gift challenge of 2010 went Oracle’s way with their powerful trimaran. Dan then had a brief spell with the UK’s Team Origin before Sir Keith Mills pulled the plug when he learned, disapprovingly from his personal safety perspective, that the 2013 Cup was heading towards large multi hulls. Now out of work, Dan took the opportunity to start developing the Gomboc platform, before six months later he was recruited by Emirates Team New Zealand in preparation for the 2013 AC72 catamaran event in San Francisco. In many ways this is also where the monohull AC75 story starts, because the
Kiwis were first to get to grips with successful foils on boats of this scale. In Dan’s time at Alinghi they had exper-
imented with S-foils and could see that the lift aspect was relatively achievable but that foil stability was almost intractable. The challenge didn’t go away and sat within Dan’s interest of being able to model the whole sailing environment and express both the science and practical application in a simulation format that would be developmentally invaluable, and equally so for the sailors. When the business of AC72 design got
underway he was still keen to establish whether these big cats could be made to fly reliably, and to this end he and a small number of TNZ’s design team ran some- thing of an incognito validation process on a scaled-down catamaran on a lake south of Auckland which they fondly dubbed Lake Squirrel, as in they were ‘squirrelled away’ in unbranded clothing and vehicles. The challenge was to develop a stable flying configuration that did not rely on active control – self-stable as roll moment and sideforce changed, and with an ability to maintain steady ride height. This time it was a canted L-type foil, but
there was nothing empirical or iterative about this model testing, it was a pure vali- dation exercise to confirm what Dan and the team could already vouch for in their mathe- matical predictions, and in this respect the simulator approach gained wider traction in terms of team confidence and general
SEAHORSE 39
CARLO BORLENGHI
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