Two boat testing is an integral tool for all AC teams for AC37. Hear from Shore Operations Manager Jeff Causey on the advantages of Boat Testing for INEOS Britannia.
“The rule that you can only build one AC75 this campaign is to save cost, but it’s a big change from the America's Cup that I grew up with, that I was watching as a kid, in the old IACC class monohulls,” commented Jeff Causey, INEOS Britannia’s Boat Operations Manager, who was an America’s Cup fan long before he was part of a team. “Back then, it was all about two-boat testing. Every team that could afford to designed and built two boats, and then lined them up against each other for countless hours of side-by-side tuning out on the water.
“The teams swapped crews and rigs and sails and rudders -- much of the development happened in that environment with two boats sailing next to each other and trying to measure the performance differences. And we don't have that available to us this time.”
The rules for this, the 37th America’s Cup, restrict the teams from building more than one AC75. These are the extraordinary “flying machines” that contested the previous Cup and now, the upcoming one as well. “In some ways that is a good thing, boats that size that can foil and go at these speeds are complicated. So they require a much more sophisticated support team than an America's Cup boat from 20 years ago, or most other classes of racing sailboats like a TP52.”
The rules do provide other opportunities though, as the teams can sail more than one LEQ12 (short for “Length Equivalent 12m”). These are smaller versions of the same concept as the AC75. The rules limit the number of critical components that teams can have (hull, mast, sails, foils and rudder). This means that they can still only sail one of these at a time, but different concepts for foils and sails can be tested on that boat.
The second opportunity is that ETNZ have developed a one design version of the LEQ12, and the rules allow the teams to operate as many of these as they have the resources to own and manage.
“The interesting thing is what happens when you line these different boats up against each other,” continued Jeff. “All the teams are looking forward to lining up in the AC40 against other teams because it'll give us a good read and a good yardstick on just how our sailors are doing in terms of their technique and the sharpness of their racing skills. It'll also give us some good feedback on some of the things that we think are fast about the way you sail an AC40; everything from bustle clearance to sail trim. We'll get a chance to measure those things when AC40s line up against other AC40s.
“It’s also interesting to consider what happens if you line up an AC40 against an LEQ12. We've done a little bit of sailing with the AC40 against our LEQ12 because we understand everything about what we're putting on the water and trying to compare. But if we were to go and sail our LEQ12 against say Prada's LEQ12, I don't know how much we'd learn from that because we don't really know what they were trying to do with their boat. They weren't necessarily trying to design it for ultimate speed. And we weren't trying to do that with T6 either. We were really trying to design something that would help us prove concepts. So if we lined up T6 against another team we don't really know what we're comparing it against.
“The other thing to remember in this Protocol is that all the tow-tank testing and scale models are also gone, replaced and really superseded by the prowess of computer modelling. And so much of our testing is now focussed on validating, proving the accuracy of those computer models, and to do that, you really only need one boat, and a lot of very sophisticated instruments.
“That’s not to say that two-boat testing doesn’t still have its place. For instance, T6 is very asymmetrical, we get two test boats if you look at different things on different tacks [like foils]. We can compare those to each other, but you have to tack in order to do that, but now you're sailing in slightly different sea states and you're sailing potentially with different righting moment because of the configuration of the boat. There are a bunch of things that you have to try and measure to even-out what you're trying to compare.
“When we take the AC40 and put that into the mix it’s a symmetrical boat on both tacks, so it gives us another way to check in on what we're doing from side to side, with the different concepts being tested on T6.
“And of course, one of the great ironies of the America's Cup is that it takes people racing at a very high level for maybe 200 days a year, and puts them in a bubble where they may not race for an entire year or even two years. All of their time is focused on developing this tool that they'll eventually get to race maybe two or three years after the start of the campaign.
“So it's a big challenge to keep the racing skills sharp through that development process where you're using the sailing team to refine the boat. It’s only half of what we're trying to do though, the other half of it is you still have to show up to the race course and be able to start the boat on time successfully and race it properly. And so any opportunity to simulate racing or get involved in real racing, I think is hugely valuable for the sailing team.
“Sailing two boats is a chance to do that in-house -- which we're not allowed to do against competitors at the moment. At some level when you are trying to sail two boats as opposed to one boat, you need twice as much stuff. I mean, first of all, you need two yachts, obviously, two chase boats and two safety divers, but while it doubles the resource requirement in a lot of areas, it’s not everywhere. It’s not double the effort, but it's probably one and a half times the amount of resource; everything from the number of people that we need to have on the water to deal with issues, or support getting the mainsails up on two boats and towing them out to the race course, then there’s communications and IT bandwidth and even lunches and clothes.
“It’s clearly worth it though, to get the sailors out there with something and someone to compete against. It’s going to make the AC75 stronger, everything we're doing on the smaller boats is toward that end. It's all about ultimately building the fastest AC75 we can build.”