No surprises as hulls unveiled

10.15am

The America's Cup defender and the America's Cup challenger sprang no surprises as they revealed the undersides of their boats to the public this morning.

The official unveiling ceremonies are part of the countdown to the best-of-nine series between defenders Team New Zealand and the Swiss Alinghi team, which starts this Saturday on the Hauraki Gulf.

Alinghi revealed SUI-64 just after 8am in front of hundreds of members of the public and media representatives.

The show started with five can-can dancers, in keeping with the skirt-lifting theme.

At the crucial moment the dancers revealed their bottoms, spelling out SUI64, as the skirts came off the boat.

That was pretty much where the excitement ended, with SUI-64 appearing little different to the boat that beat San Francisco's Oracle in the final of the challenger series last month.

Alinghi design team member Manolo Ruiz de Elvira said only minor changes had been made to the boat since the victory over Oracle.

"We really had to race the best boat we had to beat Oracle," he said.

"There's been some small improvements since then. We're a little bit faster than we were then, but the basic concept is the one that was already there in the (challenger series) finals."

Since then "tiny changes" had been made to the hull shape and sail area, he said.

That means Alinghi will be going into the America's Cup contest without a radical hull appendage, which is a key part of Team NZ's design for their race boat NZL-82.

Ruiz de Elvira said Alinghi had done some work on the "hula" concept within time and budget constraints.

"Our conclusion from what we saw in the last two months was that we would stay with the configuration we have."

Part of his responsibility on the Alinghi team is performance predictions, and he said that based on the information available to him it was "really hard to tell which (of the boats) is going to be marginally faster".

Team New Zealand's unveiling followed at 9am and was a much lower key affair.

Hundreds of fans streamed into the defender's compound to see NZL-82 already revealed, with its hull looking much like it did when first shown to the public in early January.

Team NZ principle designer Mike Drummond was reluctant to give much away, but agreed with a suggestion everything was "pretty much" the same as it had been when the boat was first revealed.

"I don't think you'd notice too many differences," he said.

"We have developed the boat a little bit, but just in small ways that I'm not really going to detail."

There had been speculation Team NZ might have had a more pronounced hula, which fits snugly into the back half of the hull. Drummond said the team had been restricted somewhat by time limits.

"In summary, yes it's all very similar," he said.

He confirmed Team NZ's second boat NZL-81 was faster than NZL-60, the boat the syndicate used to successfully defend the America's Cup in 2000.

"We expected that, and I think if any of the challengers had sailed against NZL-60, they would have found their boats to have been faster than 60."

- NZPA

nzherald.co.nz/americascup

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