America's Cup Milestone..Team NZ gets Hearing at last..Survival tales

by . on 27 May 2016 Welcome to Sail-World.com's New Zealand e-magazine for May 28, 2016

Yesterday, NZT, marked the point 12 months out from the start of the America's Cup Qualifiers which as matters stand are due to get underway on May 26, 2017, in Bermuda.

In this edition, we start our coverage building up to the 35th America's Cup.

While the America's Cup World Series will continue through until 2017, even though it has little to do with the Main Event, aside for the points carry over into the Qualifier Series.

The AC45S (for Surrogate) boats currently used by the teams for testing are quite different from the AC45 One Designs used in the ACWS. Featuring wheel steering, two grinding positions, hydraulic power for the foils, customized control systems and some have an AC50 profile wing (scaled down).

Three of the teams have two of these Surrogate test platforms. Team Japan has one handed down from Oracle, Team NZ has a foiling One Design AC45 (tiller steered, no grinding positions, on loan from Luna Rossa) and Team France will launch their first AC45S in July this year. Team NZ have made no announcement as to whether they have a second generation AC45S underway or not. The focus of two of the ETNZ sailing team is on the Olympics for the next three months.

For all teams, the major focus now is on the design options lock-off and construction of the AC50's which generally take four to five months depending on the construction method used.

In the last America's Cup, it was commonly quoted that 'just' to build a new daggerboard was a three-month exercise.

Next week, we hope to have a better idea of these lead times and construction options for the AC50 and the 2917 America's Cup.

But when evaluating the relative strengths of the teams, a big factor is what IP (Intellectual Property) that they take into the campaign from the previous edition, and what starting point they have.

To some extent the water is a little muddied by the transfer of designers between teams, but they have only taken what they have in their heads and not the data files from which to use as a starting point. Those stirred up design waters are even less transparent given the assistance which Oracle Team USA has given some teams. Whether that is in the true spirit of the America's Cup is a matter of personal view - but for better or worse, it has happened.

The pariah of the 2017 America's Cup, Emirates Team New Zealand is an interesting study against the above backdrop.

On the face of it, they are behind the other teams. But on the same basis in the 34th America's Cup, they should have been wiped out on the basis that they had to survive from 2007-2010 while Oracle battled through the Courts with Alinghi - that is a lot of time and not a lot of income for a commercially sponsored team. During that period, Oracle did a lot of groundbreaking research in the field of wingsailed multihulls and should have started the 34th America's Cup with a two-lap lead in a four-lap race.

Instead, Team New Zealand pulled them back, coming with a big bag of monohull design and structural IP and converting that the wingsailed multihull environment. Along the way, the Kiwi team cottoned onto foiling, but in hindsight let that cat out the bag a little too early.

Don't forget that for the 2013 America's Cup, the New Zealand boat was designed for the then 33kt wind limit in San Francisco and was sailing for extended periods in that wind strength or more in the Hauraki Gulf during sea-trialing. Oracle Team USA went the way of a more aerodynamically refined hull shape. Whether that would have survived racing in 33kts is a moot point and with the reduced wind limits of 19-25kts that were implemented in the 2013 Cup after the Artemis disaster their trade-off of less aero-drag against seaworthiness paid off.

As an aside Team New Zealand's more conservative hull design approach saved them on at least one major nosedive in San Francisco and less hull volume and buoyancy could have seen their campaign end up in a tangled mass and sucked out through the Golden Gate, as did Oracle Team USA after being nailed in a 33kt gust in October 2012.

But we digress. The point is that Team NZ are now starting from a lot further down the track than they were in 2010, and clearly have the smart thinking and technology to be able to come up with a state of the art boat and benchmark boat straight out of the computer, and then be able to refine that boat with a solid period of on the water testing.

This time around with a one design hull shape and a fixed profile wingsail there is less of a design exercise than in 2013. But there is plenty of work to do in working a smart design around some tight parameters.

With the other teams co-operating and sailing against each other in varying degrees including putting the Challengers up against the Defender, the risk is that they will get off into one corner and the Kiwis pull a top boat out of the box like they did in 2013. And don't forget the last time the Kiwis missed being the top Challenger or Defender was 24 years ago.

So while the 2017 America's Cup is certainly going to be different from those that have gone before, it is still going to be a very interesting exercise, which really gets seriously underway in the next month or so with the start of the AC50 builds.

In this edition we have a couple of real America's Cup stories - marking the 12 months to go point, and what we understand to be the situation with the Arbitration Panel Hearing over the removal of the Qualifier Series from Auckland, composition of the yet unannounced America's Cup Arbitration Panel, and possible outcomes if the Arb Panel finds in the Kiwis favour.

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Good sailing!

Richard Gladwell
NZ Editor

sailworldnzl@gmail.com

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