With the fleet racing of the America’s Cup World Series behind us, the focus turns to match racing.  In late January, Regatta Director Iain Murry ran two weeks of test races in Bermuda. Since the Protocol prohibits teams from sailing their AC Class race yachts “in a coordinated manner,” the four Bermuda-based teams used their AC45X sport-turbo-test boats. Oracle, SoftBank Team Japan, Land Rover BAR and Artemis Racing got to test their match racing skills, and, perhaps more importantly, to see just how hard it is for the hamsters (sorry, grinders) to move enough oil to tack or gybe when and where tactics dictate. When racing begins for real, teams will only be allowed to make two crew substitutions between races. On the monohulls raced in the America’s Cup up until 2007, the grinders were bigger men and their power was needed in relatively short bursts. In these boats the grinders need to produce high levels of constant output during most of race. They have a hard job!

It was not only the sailors who benefitted from the test racing. The shore teams could use this time to simulate race day schedules and procedures. It takes about 30 people to prepare and to launch one of these boats. They take at least an hour and a half to calibrate and check out all the systems, longer if they change daggerboards. On training days, there is probably some flexibility in the schedule, but on race day the shore crew feels more pressure to get the boat ready for the scheduled race start time.  The first day of practice racing saw 20 knots of breeze, while on the next two days the wind was down to eight to ten knots. This provided the shore teams with more race-readiness training: make the weather call before breakfast, and, depending on the call, install a different set of daggerboards. Of course, they have to do this on training days, too, but the time pressure is different.

Absent from the test racing were Groupama Team France and Emirates Team New Zealand. The Kiwis and the French won't start sailing in Bermuda until late February or March. In any case, they will only have one boat - their AC Class race boat. Both teams have said they will build their race boat by swapping out the hulls from their test boats, to meet the AC Class rule. With more modest budgets than the other four teams, the Kiwis and the French have missed out on a valuable training opportunity. They have also missed out on the opportunity to line up against the other teams to benchmark their speed and boathandling.

The timing of the test racing suited the four teams in Bermuda well. The Protocol was changed in December to add a 28 day “blackout” period beginning on or after 9 January. During a team’s blackout period, sailing the race yacht is prohibited. These four teams could use their blackout period for racing their test boats while continuing to refine their race yachts. Groupama Team France and Emirates Team New Zealand will use their blackout periods to ship their race boats to Bermuda – a far less productive use of the precious time left between now and the beginning of the round robin AC Qualifiers on 26 May.

The Race Committee used the opportunity to test course configurations with varying wind strengths and directions. The finish line will be as near as possible to the America’s Cup Village on Cross Island at Dockyard. It’s hard to find room on the Great Sound for a two nautical mile leg in anything other than a southwest or northeast wind.  Shorter legs will mean more laps so that race duratioin hits the target time of 22-25 minutes. How will the races play out? Will there be any lead changes after the first upwind leg? In the 19 races of the 2013 match, there were exactly zero lead changes after the (single) upwind leg. The speed differential between upwind and downwind meant that the boat with a lead at the windward gate could stretch out with around 10 knots more boatspeed once they rounded. The will probably be true in 2017. The big difference will be that on a second or third upwind leg, a boat far behind may be able to catch up if they are foiling through their tacks when the leader falls off their foils.

With the prohibition on teams sailing their race boats together, it seems unlikely that we will see the Race Committee organise any more practice racing. Teams with a test boat and a race boat (and enough crew) will probably do some in-house sparring, but we will need to wait until the teams begin racing in anger on 26 May to see what kind of matches the AC Class boats produce. It could be quite a show.