Groupama Team France christened their experimental AC45X in mid July with French F1 legend Alain Prost wielding the ceremonial bottle of champagne. Team France is the last of the six America’s Cup teams to launch a prototype for testing systems and foil shapes. Since a large part of Franck Cammas’s design team had already spent a lot of time developing concepts for now-defunct Luna Rossa, the French program is not as short on time as one might think. Money is another matter, but they are finding creative solutions.

When the mostly one design 49 foot long America’s Cup Class catamarans launch this winter, they will look identical except for their paint jobs. Thankfully, the 45 foot “turbo” experimental boats give us a few details to compare. With time running short to develop the crew choreography for the foiling gybes and tacks they’ll need to master in order to be competitive in Bermuda next year, Team France needs to maximize sailing days, even when the wind and seas are on the muscular side. To resist pitchpoling, design head Martin Fisher came up with a unique solution to add buoyancy in the bows. Bulbous forms reminiscent of a 747’s upper deck look odd but will provide volume. At the other end of the French boat, the rudders are hung the same way they will be in the AC Class yacht. Each of the other teams has come up with a slightly different solution for mounting their experimental rudders. Emirates Team New Zealand and Land Rover BAR each added length to their boats by hanging the rudders off stern extensions. This gets the distance between the rudders and the daggerboards closer to the dimensions of the AC Class but means building special rudders. Team France will just move the experimental boat’s rudders to the race boat. In fact, they will move just about everything to the race boat – daggerboards, crossbeams, wing, central structure and pod. Except for the hulls, this is the race boat for 2017.

The richer teams in this AC cycle will be able to do two boat testing by using an experimental AC45X as the trial horse for their AC Class race yacht. There is no room in the Team France budget for two boat testing, but once they begin sailing their race boat in Bermuda they should have plenty of opportunities to check in with the other teams.

With the smallest budget, Franck Cammas and his team need to be very creative. Perhaps they draw inspiration from their location, nestled between the massive reinforced concrete bunkers that the Nazis built in a staggeringly short time - although with a massive budget – to house the maintenance facilities for their World War II U-boat fleet. Full of clever ways to move submarines around and to protect them from Allied bombers, the place was a technical marvel. Fifty plus years later, in 1997, with the Cold War over,  the French navy shut down their submarine operations on the site, leaving the city of Lorient with a huge white elephant and dramatically less employment. The inspired lemonade-from-lemons solution of was to use the submarine pens for boat-building and repair facilities for offshore racers and cruising yachts and to make Lorient the Silicon Valley of offshore sailing. The Eric Tabarly City of Sail is a modern museum and educational facility that attracts and educates the general public. Visitors can stroll the docks and see an amazing assortment of offshore racers. On the day of Team France’s christening, Thomas Coville’s 100 foot ultime provided the most dramatic sight. Seeing an ultime and an AC boat together gets one thinking and raises some questions about the current trajectory of the America’s Cup…

In 1907, Sir Thomas Lipton presented his fourth challenge, proposing a match between 75 foot sloops – a cost-saving reaction to the extremes of Shamrock III and Reliance in the 1903 match. New York Yacht Club commodores J.P. Morgan and Cornelius Vanderbilt justified the club’s rejection of Lipton’s challenge on the principle that the defender should not limit himself to anything less than the biggest, fastest yacht permissible under the Deed of Gift. No one questions the speed of the 49 foot foiling catamarans for the 2017 Cup, but neither can anyone pretend that they have the grandeur upon which Morgan and Vanderbilt insisted in 1907. The racing in 2017 will be fascinating, but with the current assumption that there will be another match two years later, we may find ourselves comparing the 2019 Cup teams in their 49 footers with the exploits of Coville, François Gabart, Francis Joyon, Yves Le Blevec and perhaps others, racing single-handed around the planet in their 100 foot foiling ultimes. With the prospect for 2019 of having almost as many 100 foot ultimes racing as 49 foot AC Class yachts, maybe a bit more creative thinking is in order for the America’s Cup.