In a setting more industrial than nautical, Team New Zealand’s America’s Cup defence is taking shape. The hull of the boat that will sail for the Auld Mug in October is currently under construction at the team’s yard on Auckland’s North Shore, and importantly it’s going as planned.
“We're pretty much bang on,” says Dan Bernasconi, Team NZ’s technical director. “We're on schedule for getting our race boat complete, commissioned and launched in the second quarter of next year.”
Even with the build of the AC75 now well advanced, there’s still plenty to keep Bernasconi’s design team busy, sometimes only finishing designs a week ahead of construction.
The sailing team also has important work to do, evaluating new equipment and pushing development forward.
“Such a big part of the America's Cup is making sure that you have a fast enough boat that come the end of it, you can compete,” explains skipper Peter Burling. “Like motorsport, if your car's not fast enough, it makes for a pretty tough race.
“Since [the Preliminary regatta in] Jeddah, we’ve been trying to push a few parts forward before the design deadlines, which are coming up pretty quick.”
Those deadlines are a big challenge for Bernasconi. Timelines have been set and have to be met.
“We knew probably a year before the start of construction exactly what day we had to have the hull shape decided. And we're all working towards that date, and that date doesn't move,” he says.
And when that date arrives, “the people who were working on the hull just stopped looking at hull shapes. You just stop thinking so hard about the parts that are already decided, and you focus on what's left and what decisions still have to be made.”
The 2024 Cup in Barcelona was the second outing of the AC75 foiling monohull. Despite Team NZ’s successful defence in 2021, Bernasconi says they started the design of the new boat with a “clean slate”. This time around, teams are only allowed to build one boat. Although there may be some similarities in the all-important foil shapes, he expects there to be plenty of variation among the teams in the boats themselves.
“Certainly on our side we looked at a whole range of options of hull shapes and systems and it wasn't super obvious what the right way to go is. Given there's not a clear-cut winner, I suspect teams will have gone in different directions on that, and it'll be really interesting to see, given we've been so focused on our own boat, it's fascinating for us as designers to see what other people have done.”
Bernasconi says they’re just over the peak of the design for the AC75.
“At the same time, we're sailing our AC40, testing new foils and new concepts, new systems in terms of hydraulics and electronics. We're using the test boat and taking what we're learning from that and feeding it into the design decisions we still have to make on the AC75.”
A former design engineer with Formula 1 team McLaren, Bernasconi entered the America’s Cup world for the 2007 regatta in Valencia. From the soft-sailed heavy monohulls to winged foiling catamarans and now the foiling monohulls, he’s witnessed a massive change in the boats, but from his point of view the biggest development has been the tools at the designers’ disposal.
“Everything now is so driven by simulation. Every decision on whether something is faster or slower comes down to what our modelling says is faster or slower,” he says.
“The design processes have moved on massively to the point where it's very much an academic subject of design. We've got a lot of mathematicians, physicists and software engineers who are designing the boat and only a very small minority of naval architects.”
That means on-water testing is about validating what they’re seeing on the computer screen, rather than whether one design is faster than another. But there’s still a role for the sailors, albeit on dry land.
“Now you can actually sail on a simulator and compare what's happening in a virtual world to what's happening on the water. That's a big part of our jobs,” says Burling. “It means you're probably more engaged with the designers, you can evaluate more of the yacht, which is actually great for the sailors to get involved at that point.”
If Burling’s keen to get the new boat out on the water, he knows the importance of waiting.
“You offset how early you launch and how much sailing you get versus how long you can design for in the first place before you pull the trigger on everything. You've got to be quite aggressive in this game and take risks at times. We've tried to do that with our launch deadline.
“It won't be sailing here for a long time but it'll definitely do a good little block here, and try and tick everything off before we ship it off to Europe.”
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