October 2017 - Issue 452
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Cut! 2017 America's Cup Report by Andy Claughton
The excitement and theatre of the 35th America’s Cup are over, the fans and supporters have enjoyed their victory, or got over their defeat… The investors and sponsors are enjoying the spoils of victory, or working out if this thing really is such a good idea. In the technical community a lucky few have the 36th America’s Cup in the subject lines of their inboxes, the rest jockey for position and opportunity with likely challengers.
In short, it’s business as usual. This is a tricky time for teams who sought to use the America’s Cup as a basis for a sustainable business, but the America’s Cup is the ultimate ‘winner takes all’ trophy. That was what the writers of the Deed of Gift wanted, and history has shown that it’s difficult to disengage the competition from this rather anachronistic and challenging model.
So the cycle has started again and that means waiting in an information vacuum while the enthusiasm for the Cup wanes and fans are left asking when is the next Cup? Some see this as a terrible way to treat your new fan base – but that’s the event.
The new Defender, Emirates Team New Zealand, have accepted a challenge from Circolo della Vela Sicilia and have gone into ‘Protocol Purdah’. In the coming weeks they will hammer out a mutually acceptable agreement that outlines the terms and conditions of the next Match and how the event will be run. It’s a massive task: marketing and media rights, dates and venues, terms for other challengers, arbitration arrangements and so on. Typically a document of 100-plus pages and any other potential challenger is stymied until it is published. Who knows, a few months’ mature consideration by the Defender and Challenger of Record might spawn an even better event.
On the upside for those on the sidelines the unhappy possibility of legal action during this fallow period will probably be avoided, because two well-established yacht clubs and management teams are involved.
A legal challenge to the published Protocol has happened twice in my career, the litigation always touted as being ‘to protect the integrity of the Cup’ by forcing the Defender to comply more closely with the Deed of Gift. In reality these challenges were only intended to force the Defender into a Match against a single challenger. This gave that challenger direct passage to the Cup Match, without having to beat other challengers first. While it’s happening the time spent in the courts is hugely frustrating but on both recent occasions the face of the Cup changed for the better.
For the Mercury Bay Boating Club their 1988 challenge was a heroic failure and their 90ft waterline sloop was beaten by the 64ft catamaran of the San Diego Yacht Club. But as a result the San Diego YC was jolted into action and the boats changed from 12 Metres to the new AC Class (ACC) monohull which ran for five versions through to 2007 in Valencia.
For the Golden Gate Yacht Club in 2010 their legal challenge was a specta - cular success. Reaching the Challenger Final, let alone the America’s Cup, had always proved beyond Oracle Team USA. After the 2007 Cup their legal team believed that the credentials of the Challenger of Record did not comply with the requirements of the Deed of Gift. Over a period of 18 months they challenged Alinghi in the courts and won.
Alinghi were obliged to race a Deed of Gift Match against Oracle in Valencia in multihulls that were at the maximum 90ft waterline length limit. Alinghi chose a catamaran configuration, Oracle a trimaran with 110ft floats! Once the wing sail was fitted this boat was pretty much unbeatable on the long offshore courses (by this point Alinghi owner Ernesto Bertarelli had also largely lost interest in fighting off what he regarded as a ‘win at all costs’ challenge and decided against building a wing rig of his own – ed).
Having finally won the Cup with skilful legal work and massively innovative naval architecture, Oracle were now able to shift the boats from monohulls to multihulls and subsequently hosted a spectacular defence in San Francisco. But of course it takes desire and commitment at every level to sustain a prolonged defence of the America’s Cup.
I haven’t seen the accounts but I expect that by the time the Cup was won in San Francisco the aggregate Oracle spend on the America’s Cup could be approaching one billion dollars… this amount of money would get even Larry Ellison’s attention.
Oracle were obliged to defend the Cup in 2017, but now they had a tighter budget and a clear mandate to the commercial team to make as much money as possible. The aim was to successfully defend the Cup at minimum cost. Hence the venue going to the highest bidder, Bermuda, and an essentially one-design class with a small crew to minimise costs.
Every team in Bermuda had lapses of control, but Team New Zealand had fewer of them – even running very edgy foils. The Challenger Final against Artemis (above) was the hardest fight for the new Cup holders, especially as they were still working hard to improve their sailing performance.
Oracle were also enthusiastic supporters of the subsequently drafted Framework Agreement but always on the understanding that cost control was paramount. This Framework Agreement was signed by all the teams except Emirates Team New Zealand and would have seen the Cup contested on a two-year cycle in the same AC50 catamarans. It was of course as far away from the Patrizio Bertelli/Luna Rossa vision of the America’s Cup as you could get.
In fact Sr Bertelli has played a blinder. Once it was clear where the 35th America’s Cup was heading he retrenched and threw his weight behind New Zealand. His contribution, along with that of their own longterm financial supporter and CEO Matteo de Nora, meant that Emirates Team New Zealand were ultimately both well staffed and better funded than many observers believed. The quid pro quo for this support was for Luna Rossa to be the Challenger of Record if New Zealand won, and equal partner in framing the Protocol and class rule.
The Protocol for the next Cup will not present insurmountable obstacles for teams wanting to enter. There will be more stringent nationality rules, the crews will be larger, there may be a scaled-back World Series, or none at all. This is the hammer blow for teams seeking to find substantial commercial sponsorship: what do you have to sell between now and the end of 2020?
The Cup will be in 2021 and, with a new class coming and a limit on how many hulls can be built, there won’t be any boats to race before 2020. The Cup itself will run for a longer period, unencumbered by the demands of live television. So far so good, but what will the boats themselves look like?
The class rule will not be published with the Protocol. It will be several months before we know what boats will be sailed. Notwithstanding the mooted agreement to go back to monohulls it won’t be the ACC catamaran used in Bermuda. While they were impressive the foiling catamarans were immensely complicated, expensive and time consuming to maintain.
This is OK for a racing car, where everyone knows that when you look under the bonnet of a modern car you have no idea what is going on but you know it’s cool and clever, and reassuringly expensive.
For a racing yacht none of this complication seems appropriate. Our sport is about challenging wind, wave and tide, and this of itself is complication enough. If you add in 30 hydraulic actuators and half a million lines of computer code does this add to the spectacle?
Artemis were floored by numerous errors which just further confirmed that these very high-performance boats were in reality being raced shorthanded by two sailors – three for the Kiwis. But even that’s hardly a rugby team.
The boats were miserable to sail for two-thirds of the crew, slaving over the pumps to keep the hydraulic fluid flowing. For the helmsman and wing trimmer it was heart in the mouth stuff as the penalty for a small error was a race loss, and in winds over 20kt, even in the Great Sound, there was a real risk of serious injury if anything went wrong. These boats could not be safely raced in the Hauraki Gulf, Newport RI or the Solent, i.e. just the sort of places the Deed of Gift envisaged.
What are the options? Team New Zealand have to square the circle between the clear Italian preference for a monohull, and the prevailing mood that if it doesn’t foil it’s old-fashioned. It’s a big moment… the new class needs to be attractive enough to be used for several Cup cycles, regardless of who wins, since readily available secondhand hardware is the key ingredient to keeping costs down for new teams.
One of the chief advantages of being Defender and Challenger of Record is that you can know what the next class rule looks like long before revealing it to the other challengers. To some extent New Zealand may have blown their cover in terms of what the next Cup yacht might look like…
The prototype of the next-generation Volvo Ocean Race yacht has been unveiled in Lisbon. This was designed by some of the major players in the Emirates Team New Zealand brain trust, designer Guillaume Verdier and engineer Dan Bernasconi among them. The Volvo management are talking of a foiling monohull that can also be reconfigured to meet the Imoca 60 class rule after a keel, rudder and rig swap.
Can the Cup be raced in this sort of boat? Of course you can race the Cup in anything that floats. Where I can see a foiling monohull, I can’t see a solid wing sail. The boats will have a wing mast with soft sails. One area where you could enhance performance would be to explore doublesurface sails, such as inflatable luff jibs which add performance with little cost. Such tweaks away from the traditional look would give areas of development that are visible to the spectators and pundits, not hidden below decks. They might also throw out the odd bit of trickledown to other types of sailing.
To make this concept work the issue of stored power and ride height control will have to be tackled in a more rational way than previously. Sailing is a physical sport, if something needs moving human muscle power does it. There are separate speed records for big boats with powered winches but they are somewhat infra dig. The AC Class catamarans did not get this right; it’s worth exploring why to highlight some of the considerations facing the writers of the new class rule.
When Emirates Team New Zealand first foiled in San Francisco it was in a class where the measurement rules were written to make foiling a non-viable solution. Thanks to clever covert development they circumvented this, but it created a boat that was very hard to sail.
The foiling configuration was only marginally stable. You needed a constant flow of large volumes of hydraulic fluid to keep the boat flying because the hydrofoil angle of attack could only be adjusted by rotating the whole daggerboard and rudder. This meant you were moving large heavily loaded components to make fine adjustments to the lift. Unfortunately after the San Francisco Cup these shortcomings were not addressed – the rules that gave rise to the configuration of the 72ft catamarans were simply copied and pasted into the rule for the new boats.
While a lot of time was invested in making the platforms and wing onedesign, in the interests of cost control, by not tackling these clumsy foiling systems enormous costs were added.
The new boat fell between two stools. We want manual power generation because that’s the ethos of the sport, but you had to have some ‘stored energy’ as a safety net. The fixed-geometry foils and having no passive ride height control left the crew struggling to keep that safety net intact. If the class rule had permitted a Moth-like system, in other words ride height control using flaps on the foils, then the burdens on the grinders/‘cyclors’ would have been reduced and a safer, less edgy boat would have developed.
Chapeaux to the ETNZ cyclors and systems guys, they built on their 2013 experience to develop a new controls package that gave their sailing team a massive edge. This was something new, an America’s Cup where the key performance differentiator was systems.
So that’s it, the next America’s Cup Match will be in Auckland in February 2021 in foiling monohull sloops that are 70ft long. Hopefully they will capture the effortless speed and apparent simplicity of the Moth. On the other hand, having seen the J-Class yachts in Bermuda, no one would balk at using these for the Cup. And it would put a huge smile on the face of Tom Whidden and Ken Read!