Left: Team New Zealand’s fiercely hardworking and touchingly devoted shore team come aboard after racing finishes on Day 2. What often distinguished Dalton’s tight squad is that once the work on the racecourse was done, rather than jump straight into a powerboat the Kiwi sailing team most often stayed onboard for the tow-in, helping out and folding sails along with everyone else. Above: designed for this… Team NZ in 8-12kt of wind and moderate sea state. Of the four returning teams in Barcelona only Luna Rossa and Team NZ raced AC75s with a clear design path linking them to the two teams’ first AC75s of five years ago. Go figure…
its victory in a shifty breeze between 7 and 11kt, with occasional gusts to 13kt. ‘On average a day like we had today is quite typical of the October conditions for Barcelona,’ Bernasconi noted. As it hap- pened, most of the nine races of the Cup Match were in similar wind ranges. Bernasconi: ‘We probably had a slight
edge in the conditions we raced in. The two boats maybe targeted different condi- tions. If every day had been in 18-20kt would the result have been the same?’ He shrugs. ‘That’s sailing… you have to pick a
design and you have to set a target. We knew the racing could be in 18-20kt and we designed a boat that would not be bad in those conditions. We wanted to be absolutely the fastest boat out there in 8-12kt.’ Speed-wise, the two boats often seemed
evenly matched in straightline performance – with a click more upwind pace to ETNZ and a slight downwind advantage to Ineos Britannia. Match racing has always put greater value on upwind performance than downwind. Win statistics overwhelmingly support the formula: win the start and get around the top mark first in a position to protect the lead from there on. Reinforcing their upwind focus, New
Zealand’s sailplan was set up consistently flatter than the British team’s and they were almost always sailing on smaller jibs. Their unique ability to individually trim both mainsail skins was a major con - tributor, according to Glenn Ashby, who was mainsheet trimmer in all three of ETNZ’s previous foiling campaigns.
‘You want very “stood-up”, high-aspect
sailplans with even spanning,’ he said. ‘When you see the frontal onset flow the Kiwi sails were very rigid, like a wing. ‘Both teams are trying to get their sails
through a wide range of conditions. ETNZ’s package is pretty special,’ Ashby continued. ‘When both boats are sailing in range there is not a huge difference. But when you are exiting manoeuvres, or negotiating puffs and lulls, the gearbox that ETNZ has with their sail package is pretty impressive.’ This was probably the most telling
difference in the opening encounters of the Match. It was clear that the New Zealand boat was able to exit tacks closer to the wind than Britannia and regain optimum speed much faster. With four upwind legs and four or five tacks a leg, that level of advantage could total up to 400m over the course of a race. ‘There are plenty of tacks in each race, and it all adds up,’ said British co-helm Dylan Fletcher. He con- firmed the British team in Barcelona, working with its Mercedes F1 partners back at Brackley, UK, was working 24/7 to try to catch up. The path to developing and improving
this level of performance in the AC75s is more akin to the Formula One world than traditional yacht racing. It involves teams of software engineers operating in a twilight battleground of software wiz- ardry. Their mission is to constantly refine the systems driving a complex universe of electronics, hydraulics and mechatronics, with interlinking and multiple functions, all hidden under the deck.
This is at the heart of the ETNZ
gearbox that Ashby admired, the complex control system that provided those fast responses to every lift and nuance of the breeze and kept the boat driving hard through every turn. ‘The closer you can keep the boat sailing to its optimum at all times, whether in the middle of a tack or an acceleration, the quicker you will get around the racetrack,’ he said. It is about maximising efficiency in
translating the human power supply – delivered by the cyclors pumping hydraulic oil – into highly choreographed sequences of actions to drive the boat at peak perfor- mance every second of every race. ‘You have a tight limit of available
power and maybe as many as 20 functions controlling the sails,’ Bernasconi explained. ‘There is a lot of complex logic involved and we have been working on that throughout the campaign. It is one of the few things you can change all the way through to the end of the Match, as to how you direct that power. ‘Manoeuvrability has been a massive
learning curve for all the teams,’ he added. ‘As we have seen, the differences between the boats on the racetrack are as much, if not more, to do with how you manoeuvre as how you go in a straight line. These boats are always accelerating. You rarely get to your top speed before the next tack, so it is about the dynamics and about being able to trim the sails and foils into their optimum configuration at every point in that acceleration build.’ ‘A huge part of the magic is in the soft- ware,’ says ETNZ performance engineer
SEAHORSE 45
JASON LUDLOW
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