Emirates Team New Zealand AC75 yacht Te Aihe lies on its side in the Waitemata Harbour after a slight mishap during sailing. Photo / ETNZ
Emirates Team New Zealand AC75 yacht Te Aihe lies on its side in the Waitemata Harbour after a slight mishap during sailing. Photo / ETNZ
COMMENT:
While Emirates Team New Zealand might be a foundation member of the AC75 Capsize Club, a top designer doesn't believe they will be alone for too long.
Luna Rossa's design team chief, Martin Fischer, believes that all teams will have capsized their AC75 foiling monohulls before the end ofthe 36th America's Cup.
When asked by PlanetSail if his Italian team's AC75 had capsized, Fischer was sanguine in his reply: "Not yet - I'm hoping we can avoid it. But it will happen one day, for sure," he said.
"In my opinion, all the teams will capsize sooner or later.
"ETNZ's capsize was not a big drama. They had the boat up in three and a half minutes and continued sailing. There was no damage.
"We will try and avoid it obviously, but it is not a catastrophe - like it was with the AC72 [foiling catamarans], for instance. It was a disaster when they capsized in San Francisco. That is not the case here."
Emirates Team New Zealand AC75 yacht Te Aihe lies on its side in the Waitemata Harbour after a slight mishap during sailing. Photo / ETNZ
America's Cup fans are still coming to grips with the AC75 foiling monohull, which is a novel approach in yacht design.
Spectacular splashdowns by Team New Zealand's first AC75, Te Aihe, have become a common sight on the Waitemata Harbour. However, the inside word is that their bark is worse than their bite.
The first generation of AC75 is split into two basic design types - Britain's INEOS Team UK and New York's American Magic both opted for a rather flat hull shape type known as a scow. Luna Rossa and Team New Zealand have chosen a more conventional V-shaped or skiff hull.
Over the weekend INEOS Team UK released a video showing a spectacular splashdown by their AC75 Britannia, while sailing off the team's winter base in Cagliari, Sardinia.
It was the first time that Cup watchers, other than team spies, had seen one of the AC75 scow hulls nose-dive.
Britannia rose high on its foils - the usual precursor to tripping into a face-plant, and throwing up a shower of spray, while making a hard turn to the left, finishing the routine with a very wet halt, while its shaken crew re-gathered their wits.
Skipper and four-time Olympic Gold medalist Sir Ben Ainslie, in an earlier interview with UK's Yachting World magazine, opined that given more time INEOS Team UK might have gone with the skiff option.
"I think it is maybe not a coincidence that ourselves and the Americans have taken a different path to the Kiwis, and the Italians, in terms of how much knowledge they had of the concept of the boat and what we had before putting down the hull designs for Boat 1," Ainslie said.
INEOS Team UK, skippered by Sir Ben Ainslie. Photo / Lloyd Images
That's a claim that as Defender and Challenger of Record respectively, Team New Zealand and Luna Rossa had prior knowledge of the dimensions AC75 class that was to be used in 2021, ahead of the other Challengers.
Ainslie went on to explain that the scow hull shape was orientated around helping the boat to accelerate and get foiling as soon as possible.
However the skiff-hulled Te Aihe can climb onto her foils in less than 2 seconds, so maybe that point has been misjudged by the British and USA design teams.
There is a real possibility that any of the teams may switch hull type for their second AC75 raceboat.
Unfortunately, with building lead times running at up to 12 months, the teams can't delay that key decision until the end of the first America's Cup World Series regatta in Cagliari starting on April 23.
Earlier in the Yachting World interview, Ainslie revealed that he had made a secret reconnaissance trip, last year, to New Zealand to see Te Aihe for himself.
"I went down to New Zealand and witnessed the Kiwis sailing in the early days", he said.
"The Kiwi boat has a bustle to help the boat to induce foiling in its acceleration phase. It is a very strong boat in that respect. They have also incorporated the weight of the bulb [carried by all the other teams] into the surface area of their wings."
"The Italians also have a bustle, but it is a more aggressive boat than the New Zealand boat. The Italians have been very creative, and I like a lot of the ideas on Luna Rossa. They have pushed the boundaries on creativity which is cool to see."
The first informal hit-out between the scow and the skiff factions occurred on January 18, when INEOS Team UK, who are training in Cagliari for the UK winter, had an informal match-up with Luna Rossa, who is permanently based in Cagliari.
Photographs of the "hookup" circulated in cyberspace this week.
Luna Rossa America's Cup AC75 and the INEOS Team UK AC75 training off the Italian coast. Photo / Francesco Nonnoi
The analysis was that Luna Rossa "dusted" the British boat - but with a footnote that the Italians had smaller "all-purpose" wings which create lower drag but were not powerful enough to generate the required 7.5 tonnes of lift until the breeze hit 10-11kts.
Fortunately for the Italians, they were sailing in a 15 kt Mistral and could capitalise on their advantage afforded by the smaller, lower drag and faster wings.
Richard Gladwell is the NZ Editor of Sail-World.com/nz , and a leading NZ-based international sailing photo-journalist. A former NZ representative sailor, he has covered major international sailing events including the America's Cup, Olympics and Volvo Ocean Race for the past 30 years.
