{"id":137670,"date":"2022-03-29T14:50:48","date_gmt":"2022-03-29T13:50:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.yachtingworld.com\/?p=137670"},"modified":"2023-03-22T17:03:40","modified_gmt":"2023-03-22T17:03:40","slug":"37th-americas-cup-to-be-raced-in-barcelona","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.yachtingworld.com\/americas-cup\/37th-americas-cup-to-be-raced-in-barcelona-137670","title":{"rendered":"37th America\u2019s Cup to be raced in Barcelona"},"content":"The AC75 is the class of boat that takes part in the America\u2019s Cup<\/a> and are arguably the most radical boats the compeition has ever seen.\u00a0 This type of America's Cup boat was first used in the 2021 America's Cup so this is the second event in which these boats have been used.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>\r\n\r\nThe America\u2019s Cup is, fundamentally, a design competition, and successive America\u2019s Cups have featured the most extreme yachts yet - for their time - ever since the first race in 1851.\r\n\r\nHowever, the foiling boats we have seen in the last four editions of America\u2019s Cup racing (the AC72<\/a> and AC50<\/a> catamarans, and now the AC75 monohulls) do represent a new direction for the highest level of sailing.\r\n\r\nThere are plenty who argue that this technology is so far beyond the bounds of what most people consider sailing as to be an entirely different sport. Equally, there are those who believe this is simply a continuation of the development that the America\u2019s Cup has always pushed to the fore, from Bermudan rigs, to composite materials, winged keels, and everything in between.\r\n\r\nGood arguments can be made either way and foiling<\/a> in the world\u2019s oldest sporting trophy will always be a subjective and controversial topic. But one thing is certain: the current America\u2019s Cup boats, the AC75s, are unlike anything seen before and are showcasing to the world just what is possible under sail power alone.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_153213\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"630\"]\"\" Photo: Ian Roman \/ America's Cup[\/caption]\r\n

1 Unimaginable speed<\/h2>\r\nTopping the 50-knot barrier used to be the preserve of extreme speed record craft and kiteboarders. A World Speed Sailing Record was set in 2009 of 51.36 knots by Alain Thebault in his early foiling trimaran, Hydroptere<\/em><\/a>, and was bested in 2010 by kite boarder, Alexandre Caizergues who managed 54.10 knots.\r\n\r\nOnly one craft has ever topped 60-knots, the asymmetric Vestas Sail Rocket 2<\/a>, which was designed for straight line speed only and could no more get around an America\u2019s Cup course than cross an ocean. Such records are set by sailing an average speed over the course of 500m, usually over a perfectly straight, flat course in optimum conditions.\r\n\r\nAmerica\u2019s Cup class yachts, designed to sail windward\/leeward courses around marks, are now hitting speeds that just over a decade ago were the preserve of specialist record attempts, while mid-race. American Magic<\/a> has been recorded doing 53.31 knots on their first version of the AC75 class, Patriot.\r\n\r\nPerhaps even more impressive, in the right conditions when racing we have seen some boats managing 40 knots of boatspeed upwind in around 17 knots of wind. That is simply unheard of in performance terms and almost unimaginable just three or so years ago.\r\n\r\nArticle continues below...<\/em>\r\n\r\n[collection]\r\n

2 A storm onboard the AC75<\/h2>\r\nRelated to the speeds the boats are sailing through the water, particularly upwind, is the wind speeds the sailors will feel on deck.\r\n\r\nWhen sailing, the forward motion affects the wind we experience onboard, known as apparent wind. The oft' trotted out explanation of how apparent wind works is to imagine driving your car at 50mph. Roll down the window and stick your hand out of it and there will be 50mph of wind hitting your hand from the direction your car is travelling.\r\n\r\nSo when an AC75 is sailing upwind in 18 knots of breeze at a boatspeed of 40 knots, the crew on deck will be experiencing 40 knots of wind over the decks plus a percentage of the true wind speed - depending on their angle to the wind.\r\n\r\nThe AC75 crews might be sailing in only 18 knots of breeze - what would feel like a decent summer breeze on any other boat \u2013 but they experience winds of around 50 knots.\r\n\r\nTo put that into context, that is a storm force 10 on the Beaufort scale!\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_153212\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"630\"]\"\" Photo: Ian Roman \/ America's Cup[\/caption]\r\n

3 Righting moment changes<\/h2>\r\nThe single most radical development of the AC75 is to take a 75ft \u2018keelboat\u2019, but put no keel on it whatsoever.\r\n\r\nWhen the then America\u2019s Cup Defender and the Challenger of Record, Emirates Team New Zealand<\/a> and Luna Rossa Prada Pirelli<\/a> respectively, announced that the 36th America\u2019s Cup (to be held in 2021) would be sailed in 75ft monohulls, conventional wisdom had it that the boats would look something like a TP52<\/a> or a Maxi72 \u2013 both impressively high performance keelboats.\r\n\r\nBy doing away with the keel entirely, the design is now like nothing we have ever seen, particularly when it comes to how dynamic the power transition is between foiling and not foiling.\r\n\r\nThe boats are designed to foil on the leeward foil, with the windward one raised to help increase righting moment: to help balance the boat. This means that when the AC75 is not foiling they are extremely tippy \u2013 much more so than most other boats of the same size.\r\n\r\nEssentially, when the wind catches the sails, the boat wants to fall over as there is too much sail area for the amount of weight underneath the boat \u2013 something a lead keel usually counters on a yacht or keelboat.\r\n\r\nOnce the boat is up and on the foils, however, that all changes, as everything to windward of the single foil in the water balances the sails. That means, the hull, the crew weight, the sail and rig weight, and the windward foil, all work to counter the sails.\r\n\r\nWhat all this means is that the boats go from being extremely tippy, to hugely powerful in just the few seconds it takes to get up on the foil. \u201cThe [AC75s] are really very tippy pre-foiling and then they go through the transition where they will need to build significant power. Then immediately [once they lift off] you have more stability than, well, take your pick, but certainly more righting moment than something like a Volvo 70 with a big canting keel.\r\n\r\n\"That change all happens in a very short space of time,\u201d explained Burns Fallow of North Sails, who was one of the team who developed the soft wing concept back when the concept was revealed.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_153215\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"630\"]\"\" Photo: Ricardo Pinto \/ America's Cup[\/caption]\r\n

4 'Cyclors' return to power America's Cup boats<\/h2>\r\nBak in 2017 Emirates Team New Zealand stormed to America's Cup victory in an AC50 foiling catamaran which was, by some margin, quicker than any of the other teams.\r\n\r\nThe most glaring difference was their use of pedal grinders to produce power rather than traditional pedestal arm grinders.\u00a0ETNZ\u2019s sci-fi style term for their grinders was \u2018cyclors\u2019, cyclist sailors.\r\n\r\nThe idea had actually been tried before in the America\u2019s Cup; Pelle Petterson used pedal grinders on the 12-metre\u00a0Sverige\u00a0in 1977. But\u00a0ETNZ\u2019s set-up now was very different: here it was part of a linked chain of innovations, the most obvious emblem of a radical approach.\r\n\r\nOne obvious benefit was the greater power output from using legs to pedal, but beyond this it left cyclists\u2019 hands free and allowed the team to use a highly sophisticated system of fingertip control systems, and thus to use faster, less stable foils, and then to divide up crew roles so\u00a0ETNZ\u00a0could be sailed in a different way.\r\n\r\nWhen the AC75 was first introduced in 2021, Cyclors were specifically banned by the class rule. However, with a reduction of crew numbers from 11 to 8 in the second AC75 class rule \u2013 in use for the 2024 America's Cup \u2013 cyclors are now allowed once again and all teams look set to be using pedal power onboard.\r\n\r\n\"\"\r\n

5 America's Cup boats may not be heading where they point<\/h2>\r\nWith the AC75 sailing on its foil, drag is dramatically reduced, vast amounts of power can be generated and so speeds rapidly increase. But the foils can serve another purpose too.\r\n\r\nIn order to be able to lift each foil out of the water, the foil arms must be able to be raised and lowered. Hence the foil wings, which sit at the bottom of the foil arms (and are usually a T or Y shape), do not always sit perpendicular to the water surface and the AC75s often sail with them canted over to something nearer 45\u00ba to the surface.\r\n\r\nThe further out the leeward foil arm is canted \u2013 essentially more raised \u2013 the closer the AC75 flies to surface and, crucially, the more righting moment is generated as the hull and rest of the boat gets further from the lifting surface of the foil.\r\n\r\nThere is another positive to this: as the lifting foil is angled, it produces lift to windward, which can force the boat more towards the wind than the angle it is sailing.\r\n\r\nDue to this negative leeway (as it is known when a foil creates lift to windward) the boat can be pointing at a compass heading of say 180\u00ba but in fact will be sailing at eg 177\u00ba as the foil pushes the boat sideways and to weather, essentially sailing to windward somewhat diagonally.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_153214\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"630\"]\"\" Photo: Ricardo Pinto \/ America's Cup[\/caption]\r\n

6 The foils are heavy. Very heavy.<\/h2>\r\nAs the foils work to provide stability to the boat (when it is stationary both foils are dropped all the way down to stop it tipping over) and to provide massive amounts of righting moment, they are incredibly heavy.\r\n\r\nA pair of foil wings and flaps (excluding the one-design foil arm which attaches them to the boat and lifts them up and down) weigh 1842kg. To put that into perspective, the entire boat itself with all equipment (but without the crew) weighs between 6200kg and 6160kg. So the foil wings at the base of the foil arms are nearly \u2153 of the total weight of the boat.\r\n\r\nIt is partly due to this that you will see some teams with bulbs on their foils. If you decide to go for a skinny foil wing (which would be low drag and so faster) then there will not be enough volume to cram sufficient material in to make the foil weigh enough. So some teams have decided to add a bulb in order to make it weigh enough but to also keep a less draggy, slimmer foil shape.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_153216\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"630\"]\"\" Photo: Ricardo Pinto \/ America's Cup[\/caption]\r\n

7 Sails can invert at the head<\/h2>\r\nAs with everything on the AC75, the mainsail was a relatively new concept when the boat was first announced. It consists of two mainsails which are attached to both corners of a D-shaped mast tube. This has the effect of creating a profile similar to a wing.\r\n\r\nIt is well established that solid wing sails are more efficient at generating power than a soft sail and for this reason solid wings were used in both the America\u2019s Cup in 2013 and 2017. But there are drawbacks with a wing: they cannot be lowered if something goes wrong and require a significant amount of manpower and a crane to put it on or take it off a boat.\r\n\r\nOne reason a wing makes for such a powerful sail is that the shape can be manipulated from top to bottom fairly easily with the right controls. With the AC75 the designers wanted a sail that could have some of this manipulation, produce similar power but could also be dropped while out on the water. The twin skin, \u2018soft wing\u2019 is what they came up with for this class of America's Cup boat.\r\n\r\nIn addition to the usual sail controls, within the rules, the teams are allowed to develop systems for controlling the top few metres of the mainsail and the bottom few metres.\r\n\r\nWhat this means is that the teams are able to manipulate their mainsail in a number of different ways to develop power and control where that power is produced in the sail. But it also means that they have the ability to invert the head of the sail.\r\n\r\nDoing this effectively means \u2018tacking\u2019 the top of the sail while the rest of the sail is in its usual shape. The advantage here is that instead of trying to tip the boat to leeward, the very top of the sail will be trying to push the boat upright and so creating even more righting moment. The disadvantage is that it would come at the cost of increased aerodynamic drag.\r\n\r\nWe know that a number of America\u2019s Cup teams are able to do this, though whether it is effective is another question and it is very hard to spot this technique being used while the boats are racing at lightning speeds.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_153210\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"630\"]\"\" Photo: Ricardo Pinto \/ America's Cup[\/caption]\r\n

8 America's Cup meets F1<\/h2>\r\nA new America's Cup boat is a vastly complex bit of kit. Each team has incredibly powerful Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) software packages and simulators in order to try to understand the various gains and losses.\r\n\r\nTo make these simulators and computer projections as accurate as possible each team has been getting as much data as they can over their three year development cycle.\r\n\r\nIn the case of this America\u2019s Cup it does seem the development process is genuinely getting closer to Formula 1 (albeit with smaller budgets than a modern F1 team has behind them).\r\n\r\nINEOS Britannia<\/a> have been work alongside the all powerful Mercedes F1 team (both of who are backed by INEOS) and have been open about how much this has helped their development process and after a relatively small amount of collaboration in 2021 the British team and Mercedes have created a much tighter relationship for the 2024 America's Cup<\/a>.\r\n\r\nBut the British team is not alone. When two-time America's Cup winner, Alinghi announced they would be coming back<\/a> to the event after some years on the sidelines, they also announced their own tie-in with current F1 World Champions, Red Bull Racing, to for Alinghi Red Bull Racing<\/a>.\r\n\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s really similar to F1,\u201d explains Mercedes Applied Science Principal Engineer Thomas Batch who has 11 F1 titles to his name and is was with INEOS in Auckland 2021. \u201cCertainly in this campaign the technology is close to what we have in F1.\r\n\r\n\u201cIn terms of raw sensors on the boat you are probably talking in the 100s but then we take that and we make that into mass channels and additional analysis with computational versions of those channels that we then analyse and get into in more detail. So you are looking at 1000s of plots that we can delve into [per race or training session].\r\n\r\n\u201cThat level of data analysis and then feedback with the sailors is very similar to working with an [F1] driver.\u201d\r\n\r\n
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Barcelona has been selected as the venue to host the 37th America’s Cup in 2024, it has been announced today, Tuesday 29th March 2022 by the Cup Defender, Emirates Team New Zealand and Challenger of Record, INEOS Britannia. The process for selecting a venue has been a long and fraught one, with many options coming and going. Initially, the venue decision was delayed from its original scheduled announcement in September 2021. It then seemed likely the venue would be formally agreed in time for the 37th America’s Cup protocol announcement in November 2021. But both dates came and went with a commitment to a venue being announced by the end of March 2022. The final selection of Barcelona makes this the first time a New Zealand team has chosen to defend a Cup win overseas and will likely cause some upset from sections of the New Zealand public. Auckland had an exclusive period in which to tender for the 37th America\u2019s Cup, but the sums on offer were not enough, and Emirates Team New Zealand CEO, Grant Dalton cast the net wider internationally after rejecting a NZ$99 million (\u00a350 million) offer from the New Zealand government. Since that time a number of different venues have been rumoured including: Jeddah, Saudi Arabia; Cork, Ireland; Malaga, Spain and a few others. In the last couple of weeks, however, the rumours surrounding Barcelona as an option have grown stronger with Dalton having flown to Spain to meet with representatives of the hosting bid. Spanish news outlet Cronica claimed recently that the city of Barcelona had been chosen to host the Cup and suggested that the city reached the agreement with a bid of 70 million Euro to secure the America\u2019s Cup hosting deal. The Barcelona money is believed to have come from a number of different sources, led by the Government of Catalonia. \u201cBarcelona really is one of the most recognised cities in the world so to have the ability to host the most recognised sailing event in the world is hugely exciting,” Dalton said. “As Defender of the America\u2019s Cup, we have always felt the responsibility to grow the event, the audience, and the sport of sailing on a global scale and certainly having the event hosted in a significant city such as Barcelona will allow us to propel the growth trajectory on the global sporting stage. When thinking ahead to the 37th America\u2019s Cup and the AC75\u2019s racing within a few hundred metres of the Barcelona beach, waterfront, and race village fan engagement zones it will be nothing less than spectacular.\u201d INEOS Britannia Team Principal Sir Ben Ainslie said, \u201cWe are delighted the iconic city of Barcelona has been chosen to host the 37th America\u2019s Cup. The historic weather data for Barcelona shows what a fantastic sailing venue it will be. The marina development and race area in Barcelona will offer excellent shore side facilities for the competing teams, alongside a great event village for fans of sports oldest international trophy …Continue reading »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3349,"featured_media":137697,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[687],"tags":[2506,1227,583,2505,569,173,1469,1633],"review_manufacturer":[],"acf":[],"introduction":null,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.yachtingworld.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137670"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.yachtingworld.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.yachtingworld.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.yachtingworld.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3349"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.yachtingworld.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=137670"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.yachtingworld.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137670\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":144570,"href":"https:\/\/www.yachtingworld.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137670\/revisions\/144570"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.yachtingworld.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/137697"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.yachtingworld.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=137670"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.yachtingworld.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=137670"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.yachtingworld.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=137670"},{"taxonomy":"review_manufacturer","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.yachtingworld.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review_manufacturer?post=137670"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}