Which rocks you on about?
by John Curnow, Sail-World.com AUS Editor 1 Oct 23:00 PDT
Fleet action - Day 2 - Louis Vuitton America's Cup - Preliminary Regatta Naples - September 26, 2026 © Ricardo Pinto / America's Cup
Well, unless you have seriously been living under one hell of a stone for the last five months, you'll know that Australia is part of AC38 in Naples in 2027. You'll also have seen the racing that has just occurred on that picturesque bay for the second America's Cup Preliminary Regatta, and that there was no Boxing Kangaroo present, yet.
On paper, you could argue that it sounds way stressful. They're out there, and we are not. The French, who capsized not once, but twice, still managed get a third place out of it, so clearly learnings abound, and the AC is not gifted to you. You earn it...
We have not shied away since being inspired at the launch on May 14, in Australia's Back!, and also the short videos from the day. Later, we spoke with soon-to-be-a-very-much-deserved-AC-Hall-of-Famer, Glenn Ashby in The Cat Shot, about the tech, the JATO rockets, the impossibly short runway, along with the drive, passion, and determination that has shot Team Australia well past 88 miles an hour, and decidedly into the future.
Rocks and sailing have a long history, mostly as ballast back in the era of Galleons, the Man o' War, and other mercantile experiences, along with the hitting of them, a'la one James Cook to name but one. Now we speak with CEO, Grant Simmer OAM, and wouldn't you know it, rocks was a theme!
Not available in shops
Now LiDAR may not be as old as rocks, but it has been around quite a while now. Thing is, you do not go and get a box off the shelf, grab some cameras too, plug it all into the back box, and voila, it's all apparent to you, like some veil of mystery has been removed by the boffins, and sail trim is handled by some seriously cool maths that has looked ahead at the breeze, up at the sails and then shaped the sails accordingly.
Treating air as a fluid and mapping the thing in realtime takes some serious computing power, and the team of humans behind said electronic wizardry, writing the all-important code, and then producing things that can go on to make it better for those out on the water. Plus, in the AC you can only use it for sails and only in practice. In other words, seriously a lot of effort for distinctly constrained outcomes. For now.
So then, as Team Australia, you ponder, 'Does that make the others miles ahead?' So the question for Simmer is, do you see that LiDAR is going to be a problem for you by the time you hit the water? Or, in your experience, seeing everything in one hell of a career, it's just another hurdle to overcome?
Simmer said, "In the last two campaigns we were running LiDAR, and still trying to develop the technology. The reason for running LiDAR is to get some sail shapes relative to our own models, and see if you're achieving the same shapes real time. We have decided not to do it in our campaign, because it's quite time consuming. It's coming of age, but it's a distraction that we just can't provide for."
"Tom Schnakenberg said years ago that we haven't got a campaign where we can look under every rock. In some campaigns, you've got plenty of money. You can look under every rock for some fancy solution. As Team Australia, we have to make the decisions about the things that are going to make us go faster, which is where we're putting our resources, and at the moment, the rock with LiDAR under it didn't get turned over."
Note too, that there is plenty of talent in the ever-expanding team, both ashore and afloat, to make it a quick boat. Simmer's brutal honesty with the matter is simply refreshing.
"We'll be photographing ourselves in a more traditional sense. We just don't have the time and resources to put into a science project."
Keeping it real, I asked Simmer whether we'd get cold nuclear fusion first, or LiDAR? "I think LiDAR will happen before fusion. The consequences are a lot smaller. A lot. With the INEOS campaign, there were plenty of sailing days where we didn't get one little skerrick of anything worthwhile out of the LiDAR, but we put a few man hours into it."
See the lane change?
Again, by the time we hit Naples in, say, January, we've got a whole bunch of other things to check out before we worry about LiDAR. "Yes. Things that we know are going to deliver speed. So we're going to focus on those." Like a couple of foils, and some crew, and all the rest of it. Just a few minor things.... "The crew will be okay. They'll be all right with their sim time, and their experience."
"One of the nice things about our crew is, and yes SailGP gets in the way a bit which will happen to a lot of programmes, but mostly our team sail together, except for Parko (Luke Parkinson). So they're already a high level, fully bonded, high performing team. We're not getting bits and pieces of people from various teams. They're already a team."
And there are just a couple of stars in there as well... "Quite a few," replied Simmer.
Said it before on these pages and will say it again now, in San Fran Team USA looked a lot like Team AUS. Simmer, who has been there in one form or another, of course, just like every campaign from '83 onwards, replied, "That was a good campaign with some good sailors."
Indicator on again...
Undisputedly, Simmer has seen a ginormous amount in his journey. Quite incomprehensible in one sense. Interestingly, and by all accounts, he's also the only person to have served on an all-Aussie AC campaign before! (Gulp.) That said, as the CEO of Team Australia, nobody knows more than he what it's like to win who's still actively involved today. So, if he were on the outside, not inside as he is, what would be his take on Team Australia? How would he rate themselves?
"From the outside, and with my experience, I'd see us as a threat, because we've got an extremely good sailing team. Extremely good. We've got a boat where we're leaning on the New Zealand technology, so we're going to have a good boat, and we've got good people that can execute."
"So, I think come the start of the Challengers series, I would see us as quite a threat and sort of an underdog, but a threat. We may have been and still are short on time, and there has been some scrambling, especially as we did not start with any resources. We're building the whole thing from scratch. As Hendo (Andrew Henderson) said, 'We didn't even have a set of Allen keys to start with. So, we're a bit different; like the Americans basically just got another team and off they went, and all the other teams are established."
"So if you're a brand new team, like we were, even I underestimated, and Hendo for that matter too, the amount that we had to do. Not just pulling all the people together, but fitting out containers, buying chase boats, buying power and tools, building a base from scratch, and fitting it out, getting some gym equipment, building the simulator from absolutely scratch. We're well down the path now of all that, but it's been time consuming and sucking the energy out of us somewhat," reflected Simmer.
In all of that is also just how global it is with parts built here in Oz, then Kiwi, Italy, and all over the place. It has been and most certainly still is and will be, big. Remember, Simmer wanted 'a project', not full retirement. Doh. Just ask Alexandra (Alex) Simmer. We, as in the whole of Australia, need to thank her and all of the team for their commitment to get us to the Cup.
Glue. Pliers. Cables and heat shrink tubing
So the bow that was built by McConaghy's is in NZL and now married to the hull. The fit out of the Mechatronics is well under way. The base camp is being built in Naples, with a roof on and walls clad, so the internals are next. Southern Spars stick and the boat will depart NZL in early December, and make it to Naples as February begins, by which time Persico will have delivered the arms. Foils being constructed in various machine shops as we speak. Sailing by early March is the plan...
"It's going well. The relationship is really good with ETNZ. The combination of our guys and their guys feels good. Glenn (Ashby) is the orchestrator of all of that, he's a conductor," said Simmer. Fair bit of composer in there too, me thinks. Also one hell of a guy.
Simmer is also proud of the way the key people all speak the same language, often having worked together before, and quite honestly, you'd have to with all that is required now and next year, as well as beyond. Simmer indicates with a typical smile how proud they all are of what has been achieved in the time allotted, and also how much is going on all over the globe to make it so.
No cash. No splash.
As the CEO, Simmer also has to look at the legacy aspect. The forward planning requires investors if not for this Cup, then certainly the future. "We've got a commercial strategy that we're working on, and I would say that's an area we're a bit behind in, because we had a couple of false starts, but I think we've got a reasonable plan that we're starting to execute. As you all know, we have to get all of Australia engaged with what we're doing, not just the sailing community, and it has been a while since America's Cup was common parlance."
Point to remember here, Tash Bryant's first AC memory is San Fran, so foiling it is... No San Diego, Fremantle, or Newport in that lot.
So yes, the immortal combatant, time. It is a new world, and until recently, the AC did itself no favours, whilst others kicked on around them.
So do we go there?
Door's been flung open, so, yes! Simmer started off by saying, "We've got the group now, which is a huge bonus. Absolutely huge. Sorts a lot of things out." Indeed, but even though both camps say there is no competition between them, there is simply by virtue of personnel alone, as mentioned ever so briefly earlier.
So, we saw that the 18s may well have been the match that lit the fuse that is SailGP in The Kings of Lowriders, and the vast majority of their audience are not sailors per se, which is something the AC needs to embrace, as well. Ultimately, the question becomes, how do you work not only in with the SailGP scenario, but learn from where appropriate, but more importantly, create the difference that is America's Cup?
"Luckily, I'm more focused on getting this done, but SailGP and the America's Cup have got to coexist. I think in the sailing world the America's Cup will always be the pinnacle of the sport because it's not one design. There's a huge amount of tradition."
"I'd hope that SailGP and the America's Cup don't see ourselves as competitors, but rather see ourselves as promoting interest in the sport, sailing around super fast boats, high technology, with a cool young set of sailors, who highly skilled operating these boats. These are the things we share, but the America's Cup is not going to be 12 events a year. It's got a lot of tradition, and we can't deny the heritage and tradition of the Cup and the boats."
The AC is a lot more about developing technologies that your country's competing against others, as opposed to the one design SailGP, which is more sort of Formula One-ish, baring the OD factor, as it has very frequent events. Hopefully the audience being built up through SailGP can enjoy both events. That's what I'd like to see."
As mentioned, the America's Cup is not exactly the easiest thing to win now, is it? Simmer replied, "No, bloody hard to win it. On the one hand it would be good if the Kiwis lost it soon, but you'd have to rate them as favourites. So they've won it three times in a row. They're really good campaigners, as too are the Italians. So it's going to be hard to beat the Kiwis, and they obviously are sharing technology with us, thinking we're not going to beat them. We think we've got a chance of beating them, and going all the way."
Note to all, John Winning Jnr is not the kind of guy to do things lightly...
Remember too, that for so many people, this is the very first time team Australia will even look like TEAM Australia. For ages, everyone has been scattered around various campaigns, and now many are here to do it for Green and Gold, lots of whom would have probably got a higher paying gig elsewhere. That adds to the excitement, and it most certainly compounds the gravitas.
This is for the young, arguably at a time when they are going to need it most to take on the country's debt. Recent AFL and NRL finals have certainly proved the power of sport, and nothing can do nation like the AC. This aspect, this raison d'être is crucial now, and even more so for AC39 and 40. OAMs await those who bring the Auld Mug back and keep it...
Thank you for being a crucial part of Sail-World.com
John Curnow
Sail-World.com AUS Editor