Why we’ll probably see the AC75 in the next America’s Cup (and why that’s a good thing)

What will the boats of the 38th America’s Cup look like? That’s the $20 million question if Britain or New Zealand decide to depart from the AC75. Matt Sheahan reports

Given that this was the second America’s Cup cycle for the AC75 design rule it seemed fair to assume ahead of the event that the racing would be closer than last time, as teams’ designers focussed on a similar area of the rule. We saw this trend back in 1995 with the second generation of the IACC monohulls, in a class that ultimately saw 100 boats built over a 15-year period.

Since 2007 America’s Cup design has been bouncing off the walls with giant cats, foiling cats, and wing-masted cats, before heading to foiling monohulls. Each iteration of the Cup has seen radically different designs leaving no opportunity for refinement.

But now there’s been some stability in the rule, albeit just for two cycles, we are starting to see what the future could look like. While few people predicted the result of the Challengers series, as the Louis Vuitton Cup played out it became easier to know where to look for clues.

To see the Italian Luna Rossa Prada Pirelli lose out in the Challenger selection finals was a surprise given that many had them down as the favourites. This was their seventh campaign, and they seemed to be more settled, more confident – and as a result more dangerous than ever before.

Having got through to the Cup Match twice before, they knew what it felt like to win and lose. Yet even with all this experience, the way in which they exited the competition provided interesting clues as to both weaknesses within their own team and hints of where the Cup had now moved to.

In short, they started the event fast but didn’t develop their boat or their racing sufficiently to keep up with the changing pace among the Challengers.

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There was a view among some observers and designers that, for all their complexity, the range of craft we saw in this Cup were in a much closer design space than individual appearances suggested. Righting moments were pretty much the same and the one-design foil arms and other components restricted teams’ ability to stray too far.

This meant crew work and reliability were the two main areas on which the racing would be decided.

At one end of the scale on the reliability front, Alinghi suffered the biggest failures with two broken masts, mainsail track problems and a major structural failure in the foiling cant arm area when it broke away from the hull.

American Magic had the most hours on the water but their performance seemed to lack consistency – especially when it came to flight control.

At the other end, INEOS Britannia made the most progress from mid-August to October and appeared to have a boat that was pretty robust and reliable. Ben Ainslie kept telling us that they hadn’t changed anything but that they were just learning to sail the boat better.

Whatever they did, it certainly made a difference.

Part of Britannia’s reliability may have stemmed from Mercedes-AMG Petronas F1 at Brackley. Having spoken to some of the engineers, their ability to build complex, high quality, reliable components could well have been one of the biggest contributions.

Before the boat was trucked to Barcelona it spent time up at Turweston Airport, near the Mercedes base, where it was fully stress tested. Part of the process involved turning it upside down and putting it under huge loads to simulate worst-case loadings on the water. As far as I’m aware this level of detail is not common practice in the Cup world.

It may be that the number of breakdowns and lost time the team suffered with its LEQ12 test boat in Palma also meant they learned hard lessons which provided a sharper focus on reliability for the big boat.

So, if the next Cup is played out in AC75s chances are the boats will be even more closely matched, more reliable and able to deliver consistently close racing.

If you’ve read clause 23.2(d) in the 37th Cup Protocol you’ll know that those who signed up to this one undertook to continue in the next with AC75s if they were to win. If they decide not to, they’ll need to pay $20 million into a Challenger of Record bank account to be distributed equally among the ‘non-breaching parties to the Deed of Participation’.

And while that might only represent 10-20% of a campaign cost, it’s still quite an incentive and a sign that we might get to see some stability in the Cup. It’s been a while.

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