America's Cup - Glenn Ashby on Emirates Team NZ's new AC49.5

by Richard Gladwell, Sail-World.com on 9 Jul 2016 Emirates Team New Zealand are the dark horse of the 35th America’s Cup.

For 30 years the most successful team of the modern era of the America’s Cup has usually been visible at the front of the development cycle – as a Challenger or Defender.

But after the stunning loss to Oracle Team USA in September 2013, the Kiwi team near-disintegrated with no long term game plan and was then targeted by salvoes of attacks from without and within.

Quite whether those broadsides have killed the team or made it stronger remains to be seen.

Just under 11 months out from the 35th America’s Cup, Team New Zealand does not seem to be in their customary place at the front of the starting grid in the race to to be the first to launch their Challenger, or are they?

Although they will be one of the last of the six teams to launch an AC45 Surrogate, Emirates Team New Zealand may have stolen a march with a boat that is as close as you can get to an AC50.

The giveaway to the Kiwi boat lies in the big rudder gantry at the stern of the boat which extends the Kiwi’s AC45S by about three feet – leaving only a couple of feet to be soaked up in the slightly shorter bows.

The gantry is a massive piece of kit, spliced into the after sections of the AC45 hull. As it is technically part of the rudder it flies below the rules which talk only of overall hull length.

The extended rudder and foil means that the geometry (length, beam, foil position and rig height) of the Kiwi AC45 test boat is to all intents and purposes the same as the bigger AC50.

Skipper Glenn Ashby won’t be drawn on whether the team’s Surrogate is an AC50 or AC45. “It’s an AC45 in terms of the rule, but with characteristics of an AC50. We can emulate the performance characteristics of an AC50,” he explains.

“This boat will get us from a base level of performance when launched to one where we are very close to having right bits and pieces to make our AC50 Race Boat fast when she is splashed. – and hopefully better than our competitors.”

Ashby says he expects the other teams will also have gone down the same path making their Surrogate boats plug compatible as possible with the AC50’s. But the Kiwis would appear to have gone a big step further. Other teams do not have the same extended rudder gantry as the Kiwi test boat, and consequently their platform geometry is smaller than the Kiwis and the AC50.

Land Rover BAR (GBR) also features an extended rudder, but not to the same extent as the Kiwis. Other teams have their rudder and its after foil, completely or partially contained within the 45ft hulls.

Most teams are trying AC50 legal wingsails, and Team NZ will jump straight to this configuration, giving them the complete AC50 package.

“The AC45S boats are similar in weight, width, daggerboards, rudders, wingsails to the AC50’s,” explains Ashby. “As is the way you actually sail the yachts, including crew manoeuvres and racing mechanics. They really are AC50’s in many regards although they started as an AC45.”

(That is a reference to the rule requirement that for a 45 Surrogate the underwater hull shape of an AC45 must be used. That hull is cut 650mm above the centre plane and the hull is flared above that point to provide the necessary hull width for the crews to stand and work inside the hulls.)

“If you look at a standard AC45 (used in the America’s Cup World Series) and one of these AC45S yachts, it’s like comparing a Volkswagen Passat with an Audi R8”, he laughs. “They are totally difference in performance.”

“The technology side is the big difference between where these test boats are now and where they will be when the AC boats are launched. We are looking forward to getting out on the Hauraki Gulf and validating some of the stuff we have been working on in the computer.”

Ashby says that the Luna Rossa loaned foiling AC45 was a good opportunity to get on the water and focus on what was required for the AC45 Surrogate. (The Luna Rossa first generation AC45 didn’t have cockpits and was battery-powered.)

“We did get some gains in the set-up of hydraulics, and some of the systems were a definite benefit for us, but this boat will give us ten times the learnings that the Luna Rossa boat did.”

“It was a great loan for us, and without it, we would not have been on the water as a sailing team for this America’s Cup,” he adds.

Team NZ say they used the Luna Rossa boat “as supplied. The wingsail was a standard AC45 One Design rig as used in the ACWS. “It sparked a lot of discussion points and how we would do this new boat, and from that perspective alone it was worth its weight in gold.”

“We had to be very picky as to when we sailed it, because of the resources required to rig and launch, and often that time would be better spent in the design office, than on the water.”

While Ashby is coy about the number of designers Team New Zealand has in its spartan Beaumont St base, he says that despite the smaller boat and move to a lot of one design parts he doesn’t think the size of the design teams has reduced significantly from the 2013 Cup sailed in AC72’s. “There may well be more designers”, he says.

‘We are still running a very tight ship here, and this time of year (NZ winter) with the weather being what it is now, it is hard to get a lot of good sailing days in a row when we want to initially tick off a lot of components for the race boat.”

The inference being that the team would have needed a AC45S in the water and sailing 6-9 months ago for it to have been any real use. Four teams – Oracle Team USA, Artemis Racing, Land Rover BAR and Softbank Team Japan achieved that benchmark.

“There is no doubt that we have a big hill to climb,” says Ashby.

Part 2 of this story, looking at how Emirates Team NZ will be working up in Auckland will follow tomorrow.