News Around the World
Bleddyn Môn gets an excellent panorama covering both the working leeward foil as well as the seas ahead from his position furthest aft in the Ineos starboard line-up. It will be interesting to see if Team New Zealand’s next AC75 stays with their 2024 arrangement with the foil operator/trimmer further forward in a position requiring them to be looking sideways and down rather than along the course
behavioural psychologist would have seen from a mile off that when the chips were down there was no panic, no wild emotion, no booted garage doors, cats or dogs. Interviewing the key players revealed a quiet, assured confidence. They had something in their locker. A winged keel-esque confidence belying a 1983-style underdog mentality, and steadily they skittled them all. Luna Rossa Prada Pirelli, the roosters of the competition, the
cock-of-the-walk for months (perhaps even years) before, were found out by a masterful campaign full of bitterly hard-fought experience from Bermuda and Auckland. In Barcelona they scrapped and scraped better than anyone but a peer over the fence saw talent everywhere and none more so than Red Wharf Bay Sailing and Water Sports Club’s finest, Bleddyn Môn –or ‘Bleds’ to everyone in the team. You’ll remember Bleddyn from the Auckland campaign in 2021,
as he wrestled with a Playstation-type controller, trimming from behind the ‘Guv’nor’ Ben Ainslie. But into the 2024 campaign and I’ve lost count how many times I’ve described Bleddyn in print as ‘the vital link between the sailors and the design office’. When Ainslie re-hired the Welsh wizard he said: ‘Bleddyn is a bit of a genius. He is one of the few sailors that you can truly say is part of the design team as well as the sailing team, the perfect America’s Cup all-rounder. He is a great team player and a bloody good sailor.’ A graduate in mechanical engineering from Southampton Uni-
versity who fused a neat little aerodynamic engineering internship with Red Bull Technology from 2013 to 2014, Bleddyn is a rare talent in the Cup world but harks to the great engineers who have trod this path before in the form of Roger Marshall, Russell Coutts and more recently Peter Burling and Dan Bernasconi. He has indeed been a vital link between sailor feel and engineering intelligence, while also carving out a key role as foil trimmer at the aft of Britannia. ‘In my degree I specialised in aerospace, and I think that’s what
gave me my initial entry into the America’s Cup; the way the Cup is now developing in aerodynamics, an understanding of that is super-important and I think that gave me a good footing in terms of my role within the team, both on the sailing side but also to be able to communicate and feed back to the wider design team.’ When Britannia was launched the Port Vell was a chatter of
opinion about the aft trim pods but there was real thought there: ‘The crew configuration across all teams is subtly different and it really comes down to the decisions around crew roles and cockpit
24 SEAHORSE
layouts – which are made a long way out from launching these boats. But there are always nuances that you can continue to develop as a sailing squad and one of our main responsibilities is working out how best to get these boats around the racecourse in the best performing manner. ‘As a crew of eight we divvied up the roles between us. Obviously
the primary aim of the cyclor unit is to provide power, then between the four remaining afterguard it’s super-important to get the most performance out of the boat, in a straight line and around the corners – for the helms primarily but also as trimmer pilots we can help in terms of the positioning of the yacht against the opposition.’ When you speak to Bleddyn it’s obvious: ‘From our more rearward
position on the yacht compared to other teams we’ve got a really nice view forward of the foil looking at the waves that are inbound, which is super-critical especially on the rougher days we’ve had out here in Barcelona. Having that forward view really gives you a good insight as to what’s coming next so that you’re able to trim appropriately for that. ‘It’s different from what we see from other teams, but we feel
that with the playbook that we have, and the crew that we’ve got, this setup is powerful particularly in dynamic situations. We had some extremely intense racing against Luna Rossa in the Louis Vuitton Final and that was a great test of our playbook, our boat, our communication skills. Another advantage of our aft position in the yacht is that we are able to feed back to the helms as to what’s going on particularly when a boat is close behind. Many have pointed to the secret-sauce of the team’s integration
with the Mercedes Petronas F1 Team and for reasons of secrecy we will never know the full story. However, what the team have revealed are the Mission Control studios that are operational both in Barcelona and Brackley, Northamptonshire. Bleddyn plays it ortho- dox but hints, saying: ‘This time round we’ve been heavily integrated with Mercedes F1 – who also supported us towards the end of the last campaign. I think that’s proved very powerful to us as a team.’ So what exactly does that look like? Are we talking F1 levels of
live telemetry? ‘A key part of our warm-up before a race is to dial into the conditions both in a straight line and in manoeuvres, and as part of that we do get feedback live from the shore which is boosted by the support that we get from Mercedes and the detailed analysis which they’re able to do.’
JASON LUDLOW
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