Mark your calendar: 27 December 2016 is the earliest date you may launch the new America’s Cup Class catamaran that you will race 150 days later on 26 May 2017 when the round robin begins. 

What will you be doing between now and then? Let’s assume that the class rule will not change yet again. Your hulls and cross beams and your wing’s planform and sections are all defined, so you can already be working on tooling. You have a weight budget and spend some of it to have flexibility to change the layout for the control systems you will mount inside your hulls, crossbeams and wing. The Protocol allows you two hydraulic accumulators for board elevation and one accumulator for board rake control. Where to put them? The one for rake control probably goes in the central pod, right? You spend a moment reflecting that it’s a pity that all this creative work that differentiates your design from your competitors will be out of sight, but you quickly move on and let the ACEA commercial guys worry about that.You turn your attention to daggerboards, knowing that the Protocol changed to put limits on the number of boards you can build for your AC45-based test boats. You were already limited in the number of boards you can build for the race boat.

How will you test all these ideas? You look around and see that each team is going about things differently.

The boys with the smallest budget may be having the most fun. Franck Cammas has an elegant, fast and stable C Class cat packed with clever systems to shape the wing and plenty of controls for board rake and cant and for rudder pitch. Even their aero package shows that there is plenty of engineering talent at work at Team France. We have to wonder how this will scale up to their AC Class race boat. They will probably not spend much time in Bermuda for training or testing. They may be the wild card among the challengers.

At Portsmouth the Kiwis had no plans for launching a test boat before “early to mid 2016.”  By Gothenburg they had a couple of containers waiting for them in Auckland, courtesy of Luna Rossa. Suddenly Team New Zealand has a test boat and a fair bit of design work. Helping the Italians with an AC72 design has paid an unexpected dividend. The Italian test boat may be of limited value, since it is “just” a standard AC45 platform with no cockpits or pedestals and the standard tubular crossbeams.

Ben Ainslie and team will have launched their second test boat by the time you read this. It has wheel steering and grinding pedestals and crossbeams sized to give a length to beam ratio closer to the AC Class. Those beams also house board control systems. They plan to train regularly in Bermuda in their Flying Phantoms. We may not see their AC Class race boat on the Great Sound until Spring 2017, after a launch ceremony at their Portsmouth headquarters.

Artemis took their “turbo” boat back to the San Francisco Bay after testing in Bermuda. Like Oracle, they launched on the bay in February and were foiling stably upwind as well as downwind. They took the boat to Bermuda to get familiar with the Great Sound. A few speed tests with Oracle have left Iain Percy’s team satisfied they are on the right track. They will move in to their base at Morgan’s Point in Bermuda by January.

The Defender has already launched their second test boat and modified the first one to squeeze in a second grinding pedestal in each hull. They are clearly working on their playbook and manoeuvers as well as testing design ideas. At this stage in the cycle, they look like favorites. Except for AC World Series events, they will spend their time developing their design and training in the race area where they hope to defend the Cup in 2017.

Oracle will sail two test boats in Bermuda until the end of this year, then deliver the first one to Team Japan. Dean Barker and “Fuku” Sofuku have made arrangements to buy Oracle’s test boat as well as a design package for the race boat. As Oracle’s test boat evolves, Team Japan will receive the “upgrades.” They will be training alongside Oracle and Artemis on the Great Sound in January with their base at Dockyard. They will be able to contract out the build of their race boat, since the “constructed in country” provision of the Deed of Gift can now be met by building just the removable bow section of your race boat in the country of the challenging club.

Six teams, three of them operating in Bermuda. A bit of AC World Series racing in 2016 and then we’ll get a look at the 2017 race boats. One last thing… as an avid follower of the America’s Cup you surely marked your calendar in pencil. Things have a way of changing.

weight budget

oil budget

fairings

choreography

one and two piece daggerboards   what about three piece daggerboards?

Your structural specialists are wondering how to tell if a daggerboard is one piece or two – the Protocol simply says it’s up to the measurers to judge. And, what about three pieces? An upper section and a lower section with a metal elbow to make the joinery simpler and stronger?

with more force on the boards and a far simpler wing.