INEOS Britannia skipper Ben Ainslie. Photo / Photosport
Mercedes F1's highly-regarded chief technical officer James Allison will be the technical lead on Sir Ben Ainslie's challenge for the 37th America's Cup.
Allison, who stepped back from his day-to-day role as Mercedes F1's technical director earlier this year after four-and-a-half hugely successful years, said he would now spend "around a third" of his time on the sailing project.
Both Allison and Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff denied, however, that deepening relations between the two Ineos-owned teams would in any way distract from their F1 operations.
Numbers are still being finalised but Wolff estimated between 40-50 personnel from Mercedes-AMG F1 Applied Science would ultimately work with the newly-renamed Ineos Britannia sailing team. He stressed, though, that these were staff who would have had to leave Brackley anyway as part of Formula 1's new cost cap.
"It's actually one of the positives of the cost cap," said Wolff, who was speaking at an event in Brackley to launch the project alongside Allison, Ainslie, Ineos co-owner Sir Jim Ratcliffe and the sailing team's new COO Dave Endean. "Rather than losing really valuable people - because we wouldn't have idiots here - we kept them on board for an exciting project."
McLaren are an example of a team who branched out into other areas - automotive, sports cars, a WorldTour cycling team - and were accused of taking their eye off their core purpose. Wolff said he was hyper-aware of the risks.
"There's something to learn [from the McLaren experience]," he said. "But at the end it starts from the top. They built Star Trek on land [the McLaren Technology Centre in Woking], which is an amazing facility, and they went into automotive. And maybe [McLaren had] a sense of entitlement also.
"We're here to stay in Formula 1. We've always been competitive. That's not going to change.
"What is key for Formula 1 is to have no distraction and to be ultra-narrow in your focus. We thought about it a lot and decided to embark on the project by making clear that the organisation running the America's Cup is not the same one as the one running the F1."
Allison added: "I think in an earlier era it would be very hard to imagine how this would be anything other than a distraction. But in the context of a cost cap, yeah, this team [Mercedes F1] was sized at a level which was unaffordable under a cost cap.
"But what it was sized with was a bunch of very talented people. And sooner than seeing those people drift off on the four winds, being able to hang on to them and do a project as exciting as this, is a great thing.
"It takes an awful lot of time to build up talent, but you can kiss goodbye to it overnight. So you can understand why you wouldn't want it to leave. [It's a double bonus that] you're keeping them and denying them to your rivals."
Ineos Britannia also announced another key signing with Martin Fischer joining from Italians Luna Rossa Prada to be chief designer. Allison said the two had been in close contact all summer.
Sir Dave Brailsford was also present at Monday's event in Brackley. The Ineos Grenadiers team principal is understood to be close to stepping back from his role at the cycling team, where he will hand over the day-to-day reins to Rod Ellingworth. Brailsford will instead perform a new role working across the wider Ineos sporting stable which now includes the Mercedes-AMG Petronas F1 Team, the INEOS Grenadiers cycling team, the All Blacks, and football clubs OGC Nice and FC Lausanne-Sport.
The venue and Protocol for the 37th Cup have not yet been confirmed. As challenger of record, Ineos Britannia are working with defenders Emirates Team New Zealand to frame the Protocol, which will include details on the new Women's and Youth America's Cups.
Ainslie said he was confident the Protocol would be published as planned on Nov 17 although he added he did not know where the Cup would take place as that was up to ETNZ.
Jeddah in Saudi Arabia, Valencia and Barcelona in Spain, and Ireland's Cork have all been mentioned as possibilities if New Zealand's government cannot reach an agreement to host the event in Auckland again.