Ken Read warned us last month – we are in the scary time when we round up the usual suspects of rumour, subterfuge and conspiracy theory. I’m shocked, shocked, to learn that the competitors have changed the Protocol to allow the teams to train and practice race together.  Prior to this change, the protocol forbade any team from sailing their America’s Cup Class race boat “in a coordinated manner” with another competitor. That prohibition was unintended and came from an oversight by the then Commercial Commissioner, who in 2016 neglected to announce coordinated sailing dates by the deadline of one year before the start of the Qualifiers. This change will let the teams get the measure of each other as they continue developing their boats. The suspense of waiting for the first races has now been replaced by news of the teams training together and running practice races. Not very traditional, but probably an effective way to keep the audience engaged.

We had a more serious scare in late February when Oracle planted their bows in training and the deceleration threw grinder Graeme Spence over the forward beam. Fortunately neither the daggerboards nor the rudders hit him. Looking bow on at an AC Class yacht shows how lucky Graeme was in this incident, and raises the question of whether the class rule should be changed to add trampoline netting forward of the crossbeam. Remember that Groupama Team France’s Franck Cammas almost lost his right foot when he went over the side and was hit by the rudder while training in late 2015.

Now that all teams have launched their race boats we can look for subtle and not so subtle differences. The Kiwis’ pedal powered grinding system is the most obvious difference. With it comes the opportunity for the grinders to use their hands for controls. In each cockpit the aft crew has pushbuttons on his “handlebars.” The number three grinder has a joystick mounted on the deck just forward of his cockpit. Controls for the number one crew appear to be hidden under the fairing on the forward crossbeam. More about creative control systems later…

Slightly less obvious than the Kiwi cycles, but still easy to see is that neither ETNZ nor Oracle has any winches. On both boats, the wing trim line runs from a padeye on the hull to a sheave in the wing and on to a hydraulic ram somewhere inside the wing. All four other teams have winches. This raises the question of how they drive those winches. In 2013, all four AC72’s raced with mechanically driven wing winches. On Oracle’s AC72, the three aft grinding pedestals were all driving the wing winch on upwind legs, enabling trimmer Kyle Langford to slip and trim repeatedly – their so-called “beast mode.” Driving a winch mechanically is more efficient than with hydraulics. But with only two pedestals per hull, and a very thirsty hydraulic system to pressurize, it will be interesting to learn how the teams with winches have solved the dilemma of serving two masters: the hydraulic system and the wing winch. Neither Oracle nor ETNZ showed their winch-less layouts on their AC45X experimental boats. It’s probably a good guess that each of them has a simulator that their wing trimmers have been using to learn the new system.

Appendage shapes will continue to attract a lot of attention and development effort. On the rudders, the torpedo shaped anti-cavitation fillets that Paul Bieker developed for Oracle’s AC72 mid-way through the 2013 match seem to be less pronounced, and we see inverted gullwings on both the Kiwi and OTUSA rudders. The teams will continue developing and testing daggerboard configurations. The protocol limits them to a total of four boards for racing, plus two spares in case of breakage. They can make a combined total of four changes of no more than 30% by weight of any board, although changing a board back to a previous shape does not count as a modification. Unlimited changes of 10% or less are permitted. Expect the boat builders to spend a lot of time changing daggerboard tips.

Rumour, subterfuge and conspiracy theory – one usual suspect is missing from this rogues gallery: loophole exploitation. From the requests to the measurers for “Public Interpretations,” we can see that the fertile minds of the designers have been looking for the loopholes in the class rule. Controls for the wing, daggerboards and rudders must be manually operated by the crew and physically and electrically separated from systems measuring the motion of the yacht and the position of the wing, daggerboards and rudders. Now imagine a tablet whose display is driven by the measured values and shows a moving dot corresponding to the optimum settings for the wing or daggerboard. A second tablet, on a different electrical circuit, with only a transparent screen, is placed just above the first, with an air gap between them. A sailor moves his finger on the upper screen, following the dot on the lower screen. This respects the letter of the law and the measurers ruled it to be legal.

Fleet racing strict one design AC45’s seems like a distant memory already, as we are now well into the scary but far more interesting phases of the America’s Cup.