While we suffer record heat and drought conditions here in the UK and across a lot of Europe, New Zealand is into its winter and the Kiwi America’s Cup defenders, Emirates Team NZ, is testing and training in fresh to strong winds with frequent rain squalls.
The Kiwis have sailed their AC75 on 20 days – as at 12 August – and have now started to fit new external equipment (small gear) beginning with their latest reworked foils and rudder/foil. They also recently used some sails from Barcelona that hadn’t been used a lot, their small M3 mainsail and J5 jib.
Skipper Nathan Outteridge commented . . . When you can get onto the little sails, the initial part of the set-up with the small rig is getting the boat correctly balanced and the boats really come into another gear, going pretty fast in the stronger breeze, apparently frequently over 50 kts.
With their programme forging ahead, only Italy’s Luna Rossa anywhere close. ETNZ revealed their reworked AC75 back in early March and are obviously stacking up valuable on-water time, and looking like they will be a tough nut to crack . . . not that anyone expected anything else.
It is going to take something really special for Ben Ainslie’s GB1 team to be in the same league when they eventually rollout the reworked Britannia (now GB1) . . . A hull that was beaten 7 – 2 in the last Cup Match, and was on the back foot from the get-go.
Nick Holroyd, Head of Design at the British America’s Cup challenge, will have come up with something special to bridge that performance gap, AI or no AI. And the longer it takes to get on the water, the harder that will be.
A challenger in the America’s Cup, is always against stacked odds, and reducing those odds is critical. In the last America’s Cup, Ainslie went further than any British team, after a gap of 60 years to win the Louis Vuitton Cup and compete for the Auld Mug.
The heart is with him again, against the ever growing odds, but the head wonders if the bar is already too high.
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What exactly is AI doing in the America’s Cup and how far has it gone
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