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VALENCIA, Spain - They have been compared to Formula One cars, even the Starship Enterprise. One thing is for certain -- the yachts competing for the America's Cup are no normal sailboats.
The America's Cup has always been a technological playground for countries and egos battling to outdo
each other and take home the world's oldest sporting trophy.
Back in 1887, boat builder George Lennox Watson was so keen to keep his innovations secret he sent out a false set of plans for Scottish challenger Thistle to throw their US rivals off the scent.
Fast forward 120 years and raw competition is pushing the boundaries beyond what Lennox Watson would have thought possible with computer modelling, carbon fibre, delicate sensors and even sunglasses that tell each sailor how the wind is blowing.
"This is more of a starship than a ship," said Andrea Avaldi, structural designer at Luna Rossa, one of 11 teams competing to challenge Swiss defender Alinghi for the America's Cup.
Like Formula One, the America's Cup pushes at the cutting edge of what technology can do for its sport.
Most of this year's yachts are dotted with dozens of sensors measuring wind speed, water velocity, rudder position, sail shape and even how much power each grinder is putting into his winch to pull up and down the sails.
The information is fed by wireless into data bases so technicians can keep an eye on exactly what's happening every second on the 24-metre yachts.
They then confer with the on-board team to make sure the million-dollar machines work with the sixth sense sailors have for the wind and sea.
"Computers can only say so much. A new boat has very subtle differences so it's vital we give the designers the right feedback," said Ben Ainslie, one of Team New Zealand's skippers.
The tall, slender yachts that will take to the waters off Valencia from Tuesday (NZ time) in this year's cup look much the same to an untrained eye.
But designers have pored over the exact mathematical formula that allows them to tweak boat length, sail area and displacement to meet the America's Cup Class rules. Alinghi reckons 40 million equations are needed to design each yacht.
Teams use carbon fibre technology similar to Formula One to make the hull and mast as stiff and as light as possible.
Every spare gram of the 24-tonne limit is then packed into the lead bulb that hangs below the boat to keep it upright when the kevlar and carbon fibre sails fill, pushing over 50 tonnes of force on to the bottom of the mast.
"Some of these races are won in a matter of seconds over 90 minutes, so little changes can make all the difference," said Ian Burns, who has sailed five America's Cup challenges and is now design coordinator at BMW Oracle.
Keels have held a magic power over designers since 1983 when Australia II became the first challenger to wrest the America's Cup out of US hands with its legendary winged keel which dramatically improved the boat's manoeuvrability.
Until April, most of the America's Cup yachts shrouded their hulls in skirts as they came in and out of the water to protect the keels from competitors' eyes.
While nobody admits to spying themselves, the America's Cup is full of stories of divers swimming across marinas to check other keels, teams filling the water with bubbles to blind them, laser guns used to measure competitors' masts to the millimetre and even hit-men breaking into other offices to steal plans.
In the run up to this year's challenge, BMW Oracle has been able to raid the offices of its main sponsors and seconded four engineers from BMW to apply Formula One technology to the boat.
Using state-of-the-art computer modelling, they shaved off extra grams of fat that were not bearing vital load, and cut the friction on sail winches by 90 per cent by using ceramics more commonly used in F1 wheel hubs.
The team also used computers to simulate boat shapes and calculate their flow through the water which used to be possible only by building one-third scale models and towing them through huge tanks hundreds of times.
"Last Cup we had time and resources to measure half a dozen shapes and accuracy was one or two per cent either way. Now the computers do a boat shape in two days with accuracy within 0.5 per cent," Burns said.
BMW Oracle, with a design team of 38 people and an estimated budget of US$130 million ($180.53 million), can do more than most but other challengers are sailing very close with less cash.
"They are probably 99 per cent accurate on everything while we're 99 on some bits and 85 on others," said Jason Ker, chief designer at South African Shosholoza. And at the end of the day, every team knows that for all the millions, the modelling, the materials, they could simply be felled by Mother Nature.
"These boats are Formula One cars in water," said Luna Rossa's Avaldi. "But the wind shifts suddenly and you can still be lost at sea."
- REUTERS