There must have been a collective sigh of relief at America’s Cup HQ when they finally saw two AC72s meeting on a start line for a match. It took three one-horse races before we got to see Emirates Team New Zealand square up against Luna Rossa.
It was expected that the Kiwis - in their black and white imperial stormtrooper outfits - would be more polished than the Flash Gordon costumed Italians. At the start, Dean Barker and the stormtroopers outmanoeuvred Flash Gordon and hit the line at a searing 40 knots. At last, two magnificent catamarans, barrelling along at speeds four times faster than the old clunkers in the last ‘proper’ America’s Cup in Valencia 2007. The AC72s at full bore are breathtakingly impressive, although by the end of the 45-minute race the contest had turned into, well, a bit of a bore. The stormtroopers beat Flash Gordon by 5 minutes and 23 seconds which must equate to a winning distance of more than two miles.
Such measures of dominance are not new territory for the Cup, rather they’re the norm. Whenever you put a new design on to the race track - and certainly one as radical and unprecedented as the AC72 - someone is going to work out the design challenge better and quicker than someone else. Then again, the Italians bought a package off the Kiwis, so the two boats we saw for that opening match are about as similar as one could expect two AC72s to be. The difference is that the New Zealanders have since built a second boat but perhaps more importantly, have done a good deal more sailing too.
The performance gap shows up most obviously in the Kiwis’ ‘foiling gybes’, the new ‘must do’ manoeuvre in the Cup. If you can keep the boat hydrofoiling all the way through from one gybe to the other, your boatspeed might drop from, say, 38 knots to just 32 knots. Drop off the foils, however, your speed could drop to the low 20s and by the time you get up and running again your rival could have gained 100 metres or more.
Wow! Can’t believe I’ve spent most of this month’s Diary talking about racing. Up until that two-horse race we had been confronted with three lone cruises around the Bay. Following the destruction of Artemis Racing’s first boat in early May, resulting in the death of Andrew ‘Bart’ Simpson, the Swedish team has been working around the clock to complete the build of its second boat and replacement wing rig. It doesn’t expect to join the racing until early August. So we were prepared for some early no-shows.
But then Luna Rossa refused to show up for the start of its first scheduled match against the Kiwis, the Italians protesting Regatta Director Iain Murray’s insistence on converting all 37 recommendations from the safety committee into 37 regulations. The Kiwis and Italians protested two of those new rules, particularly one relating to the use of ‘rudder elevators’, which they argued had nothing to do with safety but rather would help close the performance gap for Oracle Team USA and Artemis Racing, who have struggled with the hydrofoiling conundrum.
Murray threatened to shut down the whole regatta if the international jury found against his last-minute rule changes. But the jury refused to bow to external pressures and to the relief of most neutral observers, the jury upheld the Kiwi and Italian protest. Team America and Team Sweden will have to find another way around the design challenge, just as their rivals did.
The America’s Cup - it’s a dirty, murky game - but at least and, at last, we’re off to the races.
The death of Andrew ‘Bart’ Simpson has been a huge wake-up call for the organisers of the America’s Cup who have been mounting an eleventh hour review of safety issues, things that should have been discussed and resolved after Oracle’s AC72 capsize last October. All too late for Bart, but let’s hope these safety proposals will avert further fatalities this summer.
Why bother match racing at 4 knots when the America’s Cup demands you race at 40? I asked the Italians from Luna Rossa this question at the Monsoon Cup in Malaysia. Meanwhile, what to make of Iain Murray’s job change, from gamekeeper to poacher? And which other big-name Australians will follow the ‘Big Fella’ to Hamilton Island?
The two races I witnessed of the Louis Vuitton Cup finals in San Francisco, I was fortunate to see two boats cross the finish line, both intact and still sailing. Until that point, the challenger finals had been a war of attrition, with a nosedive bringing the Kiwis precariously close to capsizing their usually impeccably sailed AC72, Aotearoa.
After some ho-hum performances in Europe, I’d begun to wonder if the sailors at Oracle were really that bothered about results on the AC45 circuit. But after a barnstorming performance in Newport, I’ve revised my view. Whichever way you look at it - financial, technological or in pure sailing terms - the Defender is going to be very hard to beat.
San Diego was meant to by my warm-weather escape from the English winter, but the shorts and T-shirt never even got unpacked. Should have brought my umbrella. Still, if the weather disappointed, the America’s Cup World Series continues to deliver unpredictability and drama. Question is, how many of the nine teams in San Diego will we see next year? For some, money’s too tight to mention, but at least the return of Luna Rossa provides the prospect of another big team to challenge the might of Oracle Racing.
About a year ago I used this column to put out a madcapped theory about holding a virtual Sunday morning race. “Pretty much every club in the country has a race on a Sunday morning, with all kinds of boat taking part. Race results are captured electronically on software packages such as Sailwave and Excel. So why can’t the results from different sailing clubs be mashed together to create one big nationwide race on a Sunday morning? A weekly handicap racing championship!”
Great to see Luke Patience and Stu Bithell throwing themselves into the Wilson Trophy, the sort of unofficial world championship of team racing. We don’t often see the Olympic stars get involved in the nitty gritty of the amateur dinghy racing scene, and who can blame them? Must be a bit of a busman’s holiday, going sailing in your spare time. So it’s nice to see it when it does happen, like Paul Goodison and Saskia Clark doing a bit of Essex dinghy racing last summer just weeks after London 2012, and now Luke and Stu getting stuck into team racing.
If you’re serious about getting the world to notice the America’s Cup, who better than the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge for some wall-to-wall media coverage? That’s what Emirates Team New Zealand enjoyed recently during the royal visit downunder. Shame it wasn’t Sir Ben Ainslie who managed to get the royal visit, although his fledgling campaign seems to be moving along very nicely anyway.
I’ve got my fingers crossed that the Oatleys have more backbone than other recent challengers of record. The wine magnates from downunder are struggling to recruit the top-draw Australians for their fledgling campaign, but they do at least have the power to hold Larry Ellison’s team to the kind of cost-control measures that have long been promised, but which are yet to materialise.
Sir Ben Ainslie was the star attraction at the London Boat Show, where the four-time Olympic Champion sounded very positive about the prospects of mounting his own America’s Cup challenge. Ben, along with French star Franck Cammas, also told us his plans to race in the Extreme Sailing Series this season. With no Cup racing going on at the moment, the global cat racing circuit has given potential Cup challengers a playground to keep them occupied for the next year.
I have barely drawn breath since Oracle’s stunning comeback on San Francisco Bay. A month later, it becomes increasingly clear that the 34th America’s Cup will go down as a classic. A defining moment in the event’s long history. But already for the sailors, the 34th Cup is ancient history as they try to make sense of an uncertain future...
After a summer of some of the most high-speed but dull racing the world never wanted to see, the America’s Cup Final delivered some of the most spectacular, unpredictable match racing in the event’s 162-year history. I thought the 2007 final between New Zealand and Alinghi was great. San Francisco 2013 was better.
The death of Andrew ‘Bart’ Simpson has been a huge wake-up call for the organisers of the America’s Cup who have been mounting an eleventh hour review of safety issues, things that should have been discussed and resolved after Oracle’s AC72 capsize last October. All too late for Bart, but let’s hope these safety proposals will avert further fatalities this summer. 
