Designing the beast-a conversation with Paul Bieker of Oracle Team USA

by David Schmidt, Sail-World USA Editor on 25 May 2016 While the 35th America’s Cup is still over a year in the future, these are busy and hectic times for the design teams that are working to build the fastest horse for the “AC35” course. Unlike Cups of yore, however, AC35 will be contested using wingsail-powered foiling catamarans that use a largely One Design platform, meaning that designers have less freedom to play with the overall design and more of a mandate to go deeper on certain key aspects, most notably foil and wingsail controls.

Still, to write off AC35 as a One Design contest would be missing some of the most important design advances of this Cup cycle.

To learn more, I recently called Paul Bieker, a brilliant designer and naval architect who is working with Oracle Team USA for this Cup cycle in a promoted role over his work during AC34. While Bieker is one of the designers credited for Oracle Team USA’s stunning comeback against Emirates Team New Zealand during AC34, I’m fortunate to know him from Seattle sailing circles, and to have had the opportunity to sit next to him on windward rails and long deliveries aboard one of his “Riptide” racer/cruiser designs.

Given the semi-One Design nature of AC35, what areas are you guys spending most of your time developing and advancing?
The idea was to make One Design the things that you could spend a lot of time on with limited potential performance gains, for example the hull shapes, the overall shape of the wing and the platform structure. The things that are open are the foil shapes, the control systems for the foils and the control systems for the wing. So, the foils are constrained by the maximum depth and they can’t stick out past the maximum beam of the boat and the range of angles that you can deploy them at while sailing is fixed, but otherwise, there’s a fair amount of design freedom, the thought being that there’s a lot to learn in that arena, so designers can concentrate their efforts there.

What do you think will bear more fruit for this next Cup cycle: wing development or foil shapes?
Well one of the repeating themes of this kind of work is that what you think is the most important and what ends up being the most important are sometimes two different things. It seems like the foil shapes are probably the most important thing to concentrate on right now but there is a lot to be learned regarding wing trim as well.

How many sets of foils are each team allowed to use during AC35?
You can build as many rudders as you want, but you’re only allowed to have four daggerboards.

So, are you guys developing different foils shapes for different wind ranges?
Yeah, I think the way these boats behave changes a lot with windspeed, so it’s pretty hard to have one set of foils that’s going to cover the whole range. And, one of the big challenges of Bermuda is that we could have a pretty wide range of wind conditions for the Cup, from pretty light to a maximum of 16-18 knots.

In any given day of racing, can you change daggerboards like you change a headsail?
Yeah, I think it would be pretty tough to change them on the water between races, but you can definitely change them for the day.

Is it easier to a design a foiling catamaran for Great Sound or San Francisco Bay?
Oh, San Francisco Bay is way easier.

Oh, really?
Yeah, because you kind of know what wind conditions you’re going to get in San Francisco. In the summertime, you pretty much know it’s going to blow. Yeah, sometimes it’s a little nerve-racking in San Francisco because there’ll be no wind in the morning and you’re coming up on race time and there’s no wind, no wind, no wind, and then you see the wind line coming down and you’ve got your 16-20 knots.

What’s Bermuda been like?
Bermuda changes a lot with the season during the fall and the winter, you really get everything from too little wind or too much wind. As you start getting into the summertime, it’s generally light to moderate.

But, it’s a pretty beautiful place to sail!

So, has foiling become safer and more stable since the early days of 2012 and, if so, how and why?
Yeah, they are getting more controllable, but it’s funny: the first foiling boat that Oracle did proved to be almost impossible to control, but the boats that we’re sailing now—the foil configurations that we’re running are less-stable than those from 2012, so the crew’s expertise has really increased a lot with experience. Also, the control systems have gotten way better. Now, the crew can control a boat with full configurations that wouldn’t be considered stable.

Is this the fruit from Oracle’s partnership with Parker Hannifin?
They’ve helped a lot on the control system response times and accuracy, and also Airbus has been helping us with the control systems.

I’ve heard from some of the sailors that the bar has really been raised as far as boat handling moves such as foiling gybes and foiling tacks. How much of it’s due to increased sailor skill and how much of it’s due to a better platform?
I think most of it’s due to increased sailor skill. As far as how the guys handled the boat maneuvers, they’re really getting better and better over time. It’s amazing. There’s still a ton to learn and there’s a lot of room for improvement.

Do you personally get to go foiling or are you relying on black-box data and reports from the sailors?
I go on the boat now and then. There’s six crew on the boat and then we usually have one observer, so the designers do get a chance to go out. In some ways, it’s more exciting for the observer than the crew because there’s not room for the observer in the cockpits. It’s pretty exposed when you are out in the middle of a net. The crashes can be pretty lively: you go from boatspeeds in the high 30’s, sometimes the low 40’s right down to five or six knots and it doesn’t take much more than a second.

Oh, my goodness!
It’s amazing: the water just pins you down. You think you’d go flying out the front, but you just get pressed into the net really hard.

I take it you’re a veteran of a couple of these crashes?
Yeah, I’ve had an eardrum blown-out. Also, one of my shoulders got partially dislocated.

How is your role in this Cup different from previous Defenses you’ve been involved in?
Well, in this Cup, I’m more of a generalist in that my responsibility is more for the overall design of the boat. In the past, I’ve generally specialized in structural problem solving and details of how to make things work on the boat. I had to deal with specific challenges and structural problems and, this time, I just get to throw in $0.02 cents worth, so less in-depth, but more in-general.

Which role do you prefer?
Both are satisfying. There’s a lot less people involved in yacht design in the normal world than in the AC world. In normal yacht design, it is more a generalist job as far as you’re dealing with all aspects of the boat, so it’s not a problem to be able to be a generalist in this kind of environment. It can be sort of overwhelming, sometimes, to try to keep up an overall picture of what you’re trying to achieve. It’s easier in some ways to just be able to knuckle-down and concentrate on specific aspects of the boat.

What aspects of your job do you find to be most enjoyable and also what’s least enjoyable about a day in your professional life right now?
I think what’s most enjoyable is interacting with all the different people. In this environment you get to work with some pretty interesting and bright people, and it’s an opportunity to learn a lot from them. It’s funny: some of the most unenjoyable or stressful times also end up being the most gratifying.

For instance, let’s say you go out in the water and something unexpected happens and, all of a sudden, you’ve either broken something major or you’ve run into a real roadblock as far as being able to sail the boat in some new configuration. You have one of these periods where, as a team, you have to solve a problem for which there is no obvious solution. No one person has the tools to solve the problem alone, so it’s pretty neat when you get a group of people that are in a pickle and you have to brainstorm your way out of it.

A good team is adept at this kind of thinking and feeding off each other’s ideas. You might hear an idea that somebody has that may not be the solution to the problem, but it gives somebody else an idea that’s one step closer to the solution and, before you know it, you get there. Sometimes, it might be an hour. Other times, it might be three or four days of suffering, but you generally get there. So, it’s kind of amazing what a group can achieve compared to what a single individual could.

So, what about the least enjoyable part of the job?
Well, it’s pretty hard work. Usually, it’s a good solid 12 hours a day and sometimes seven days a week. You can get pretty tired sometimes. The boats are complex enough that sometimes it’s not just a simple thing to solve a problem: it takes a lot of work, a lot of struggle to solve a problem. It can definitely take a toll, whether it’s the guys working in the shop or the guys working in the design office.

I’ll bet that gets old pretty quickly.
Yeah, on the other hand, if you– like myself – have always loved boats, it’s amazing the amount of learning you do in a relatively short span of time in this kind of environment. It’s not like any other field of sailing.

Is there anything else you’d like to add for the record?
Well, the thing that I think is most interesting about what’s going on here is that hydrofoils have generally been something that works in more breeze. I think if we manage to make these boats competitive over the full range of conditions that you can experience in Bermuda, then that’ll be something because it would bring hydrofoiling into a much broader range of sailing conditions than it’s been in the past.

I think Moths achieved that already, but they’re a different animal than these Cup boats.

I think that learning more about hydrofoiling with a limited power source is important. AC35 boats are operating with a limited amount of power – they use a maximum of four grinders. Learning how to operate the boats efficiently with limited power could have applications elsewhere. I think the fact that AC35 is in Bermuda could really make the technology that evolved here pretty fine-tuned and optimized and probably applicable to a wide-range of marine vehicles.

Many thanks to Paul Bieker for his time and help with this interview.