During Emirates Team New Zealand’s recent tour of the country with the America’s Cup skipper Glenn Ashby spoke to Blue Robinson about the team’s (bumpy) road to victory.

Seahorse Magazine: After the loss in San Francisco in 2013, how long was it before ETNZ regrouped?
Glenn Ashby: Obviously we had a pretty big review after the loss in San Francisco… It was nine months after we flew back to New Zealand before we made the decision to go forward, hopefully building on the lessons we’d learnt. But the financial situation was not pretty, then when the AC35 qualifying event was pulled out from under us that tipped us into a very tough place indeed. Suddenly we were facing the fact that there was no guarantee the team would even keep going.

SH: And so what was on the whiteboard? GA: Well, the wheels fell off the campaign at that point and we were left with just a small group of us. Now the plan was simply to survive somehow and then try to rebuild – but at the time, Blue, we were really up against it. It became essential to have the belief, to keep chipping away and get good people on the team in the right roles as and when we could afford it. And not just from sailing backgrounds, for the engineering, design, the aero – we just had to keep looking in and outside the square for people to fit in the right place. So after a pause of nearly six months gradually we started growing again, eventually going from a team of fewer than 20 back up to around 100. But it was a credit to the core group who hung in there and believed that we could carry on. I can tell you there were definitely other opportunities for all the guys, and so there was a lot of belief in ETNZ. Honestly, it was a tough decision to stay.

SH: All this needed funding…
GA: That was Grant’s main focus, and he was in an extremely difficult position two years ago; you wouldn’t have wanted to be in those shoes. It was brutally tough but we stuck together and, with some fantastic support from our patrons, our team principal Matteo [de Nora], our sponsors and supporters, we managed to keep the doors open. Without their faith in us the doors would have shut. There would have been no more ETNZ.

SH: Changes after San Francisco…
GA: We had 20 key points that came out of the review after San Francisco, some positive and some negative, but all good points that we implemented as we moved ahead. We had a strong team in San Francisco and we needed to build on that. It was never the plan to disband the team, the plan was to move forwards, but the way circumstances played out we had little choice but to start again pretty much from scratch. These were extremely tough times, Blue, by far the most difficult four years of my working career; I could also see it in others around me. It was absolutely not an enjoyable period, but we moved forwards, got on the water and started our testing programme – though obviously much, much later than all the other teams. When we did finally launch our only test boat in Auckland the rest of the world could see what we had been working on behind the scenes… people were pretty impressed with how well the boat sailed straight away. That was a welcome reward for us all.

SH: And the team grew.
GA: The inclusion of Peter Burling and Blair Tuke after the Olympics meant they could take the baton from Ray Davies and Richard Meacham, who along with myself had really pioneered the early sailing of the boat. The team package, from design, to engineering and on-the-water crew, was a really tight group. Things like going with the cycling element, that united the team further, but everyone still had to push really hard. Think about the tooling and engineering needed around fitting the cycling element into the boat, clearly that could have gone against us and been a major setback…

SH:Many things could have gone against you! I will never get a statement from a member of ETNZ that any one person was more important than another – but having Daniel Bernasconi stay with the team was a massive win given the fundamental importance of good engineering.
GA: Absolutely. Dan and I had a great relationship through the San Francisco campaign – actually that was the first time we worked together. We really feed well off each other, he is an extremely clever guy, one of the most intellectual guys I have ever met and also a really good bloke! My own background is hands-on, sailing, testing and development, meaning he is totally one side of the field and I am totally the other. But when we sit down together it always clicks incredibly well. The relationship between us has grown very strong – especially during the years when the team was so lean.

SH: Looking at the wing, when did you commit to the ambitious operating system?
GA: To a certain point the wing-control system was an evolution of what we used on the AC72, but the opportunity to develop a control system starting with a clean sheet of paper was utilised well in this programme – Steve Collie has been instrumental in the whole wing system. Working with Steve in the previous campaign then moving into this campaign was fantastic. Our system was very different from what other teams were using. Not having a wing-sheet to hang onto was a decision we made early on. We decided back then that you couldn’t fly an aeroplane with a piece of rope… so we took the option to do everything hydraulically. We introduced my ‘Xbox’ controller soon afterwards… just as well since I needed time to get comfortable with it and learn the new skills. The choice was also so that we could control the wing more accurately, and from either side of the boat, and not have to hang onto that rope. The whole deal was a huge credit to the systems guys, but we had global buy-in from all our departments to push hard and take this ‘technology-sailing’ to a new level. To be honest what we were aiming for sometimes looked close to impossible due to there being so many fresh issues involved. It was pretty complex. But we knew that in two years’ time, when it was off the computer screens and off the test bench, we would be roaring around in prestarts, then sailing up and down the course with ‘no-look’ tacking or gybing from either side of the boat.

SH: Was the wing that we saw in Bermuda what you envisaged, or were there developments you just couldn’t complete in time?
GA: No, the wing in Bermuda featured our finished control system and that didn’t really change through the campaign. We made refinements, making things lighter and more efficient plus a few tweaks with geometry, but these were small adjustments. Both wings were very well refined straight out of the box.

SH: Failures in training…
GA: In Auckland we had a hydraulic hose or two pop off in the very early days. But from then on we had little in the way of breakdowns, either with the boat or the wing, all the way through the campaign. Given we were pushing the boundaries very hard here, it reflects how meticulous the whole team were in putting the package together and then rigorously maintaining it.

SH: But how long could you keep this stuff secret?
GA: Even today I don’t think there would be many people globally, let alone in the other Cup teams, who would know the ins and outs of what we had inside our wing. But with the cycling getting sorted it became a no-brainer that we could achieve more functionality in our controls with the extra power we had on tap. This meant I could utilise multiple functions at the same time – jib, jib track, jib cunningham, camber, twist – all by using multiple fingers and thumbs on my little black box! This gave me some great options to changing the mode of how we were sailing the boat, plus being able to sail it more accurately and on the edge. Our boat was difficult to sail, but when you got it up and right on the edge of the ‘grip’ it was very fast. However, every single part of the package had to keep working faultlessly… We worked very hard on this reliability in Auckland – most of the performance gains sailing the yacht did not happen until we started sailing in Bermuda in the weeks before the Cup.

SH: Was everyone watching in Auckland?
GA: Pretty much. Oracle and SoftBank were out most days with BAR watching from land, Artemis the same. So plenty of big lenses focused on us when we lifted in and out. You think you are not being watched but 500m away someone is taking images of the whiskers on your chin…

SH: Were you watching the other teams?
GA: We were. We had a recon team in Bermuda. After San Francisco we saw this as one of our key lessons. So we fixed that – particularly with us being still down in New Zealand, we had to keep an eye on what the other guys were doing.

SH: Who was responsible for making the ultimate call on the ‘cyclors’?
GA: It was a combined sailing and design team decision. It wasn’t one person, we had a host of people working on all the different bits. The sailing team bought into it very early on, that it was definitely a plan. Once they saw the predictions the sailors got very excited about what it could mean on the racecourse. But it was still a team decision.

SH: Grant Dalton says you were personally pushing the idea quite firmly…
GA: Ha! OK, sure. I can’t deny that.

SH: And the initial scepticism from people on how the guys could clip in and out – that is nonsense, a design team of your stature can overcome something like that if the rewards are there.
GA: Yes, absolutely. Those clip-in and out details were tiny issues to work out once we knew the philosophy was sound. We put every effort into making it work and work well. Hats off to Tim Meldrum and our engineers, our ‘real’ cyclist Simon van Velthooven, who was instrumental in the testing phase, Gilberto Nobili, who came from a grinding background… the whole team put in a huge effort to get it off the test bench and into the boat.

SH: So with the ability to generate the power you needed more efficiently – you proved that torque really is cheap.
GA: Ha! Great line, Blue… I’m very happy with that.