America’s Cup: The curious protest against Team New Zealand

Team New Zealand's America's Cup winning boat Te Rehutai arrives back at base. Photo / Team NZ

The America’s Cup isn’t a yacht race. It’s a design race — and the truth of that can be seen by Alinghi Red Bull Racing’s protest against the design package sold by Team New Zealand to the latecomers, France’s Orient Express Team.

The protest has just been dismissed by the Cup’s arbitration panel on the basis that it was outside its statute of limitations, though they hinted that its other complex assertions — surrogate boats, coordinated testing and information sharing, may also not have held water.

It’s the thinking behind the protest that holds the most interest — plus the rumours of the vast speeds being attained by the AC75s as all six competing syndicates work their way through testing before building their one-and-only race yachts designed for Barcelona waters next year.

Some say 50 knots (93km/h) is common for Team New Zealand now on the Hauraki Gulf. Others say 55 knots has been surpassed (102km/h, just about enough to trigger a motorway speed camera). Barcelona presents new challenges — sea swell as opposed to shorter chop found in the closer-to-shore courses in Auckland in AC36 — and, with hull clearance estimated to be no more than 10-20cm, for example, precision design is paramount.

So challenging teams who did not take part in AC36 are at a disadvantage in AC37; they are a whole generation behind these exciting 75-foot foiling monohulls.

Ineos Britannia, American Magic and Italy’s Luna Rossa all took part; all are assessing different directions in their testing and builds.

Alinghi, however, re-entered the Cup for the first time since 2010 — and purchased Team NZ’s old boat, Te Aihe, as a way of getting up to speed on matters of design and sailing the tricky AC75s.

All well and good — until France’s Orient Express Team entered late back in January. In February, the announcement was made that the French would buy a new design package from Team NZ, complete with sails, rig and boat information.

The kicker was that this was a newer design package than the Swiss received when Alinghi took delivery of Te Aihe.

That triggered the Alinghi protest — seemingly on the basis that the French design package would be faster as it incorporated new data from Team NZ testing. It was dismissed because any protest had to be made within 10 days and the panel basically felt there had been clear communication of what took place in February.

That meant no need to delve deeper into the other, complicated allegations in the protest — all of which generally pertained to Team NZ’s stipulation of only one race boat, no surrogate yachts or co-ordinated testing of yachts against each other and no information-sharing. That decision was made to help keep costs down and also to prevent a Cup billionaire from building multiple boats to find the fastest.

That’s what moneyed American Bill Koch did in the 1992 Cup, defeating Dennis Conner in the defender series and then winning the Cup match against the Italians. The one-boat strategy effectively stops someone from “buying” the Cup.

Long-time watchers know, too, that the Cup is essentially weighted towards the holders; they make the rules and, in the case of Team NZ, their AC36 boat was so far ahead of the opposition that they’ve had a head start in designing the next-generation yachts to race in Barcelona.

But at least one America’s Cup source believes the Alinghi-Orient Express deals not only create huge interest in the different approaches but also put Team NZ in a position where they must be stone-cold certain of their own design direction, led by the celebrated Dan Bernasconi.

“I think you can say both Alinghi and the French have an advantage over each other,” the source said. “Alinghi have had their [test] yacht for about 18 months; they are already in Barcelona, have been sailing there for months.

“They also have the advantage of an F1 team [Red Bull] helping them design-wise.

“We all saw the importance of learning to sail the AC75s in the last regatta — it’s not just about design. All the teams learned to go faster during the actual racing, it was pretty noticeable.

“The French are starting very late.

“They won’t get their AC40 until very late and, while they have a great boat builder in France producing the boat for them, they will pretty much have to switch straight away to their AC75 race boat — not much time to learn anything.

“So there are advantages on both sides; you could say it is a level playing field but levelled in different ways — and competitiveness among the challengers is way better than having a team or teams who can’t keep up. For Team NZ, it’s partly about that but also about revenue; we don’t know what the Swiss or the French paid but it will have been significant.

“But that means Team NZ will need to be completely sure about their own design — there’s no room for arrogance or complacency when you are selling design packages.”

It is also possible to be a bit too cute in design terms. “Few in New Zealand’s America’s Cup history will forget the 2003 Cup match, lost 5-0 to Alinghi, when the boat was designed with several revolutionary concepts (including the infamous “hula hoop”) but was too fragile and broke down under pressure.