SR:
Give me a feeling for what’s going on around the ETNZ Team Base in Auckland right now on the eve of the launch of the first AC72?
PM:
It’s obviously a really exciting time! It’s hard to get any work done for us office boys. I’m looking out the window right now and they just put the wing on the boat, as we speak. We just put the hulls in the water this morning. We put the wing up the other day, just to make sure all of the rigging fit, and to do some load testing. In the next hour or two will be the first time that we put the boat in the water with the wing up. So after a couple of years of working on this, seeing it on paper, and now seeing it on the water, it’s all coming to a culmination. We get to see how it performs. We get to see how it all works, and if it works like we think it’s going to. We get to learn about the things that we might want to change.
We’ve also got our second boat design that we’re working on simultaneously, and all of the decisions are coming to a head on that as well. We’re super anxious to get a little bit of time in the water, to get a qualitative feel for how the boats working. We want to get some data off of it to verify our assumptions for the second boat.
SR:
Were there any design changes that were made after the team put the rig up the other day?
PM:
Yes. There are typical small little rigging changes, but nothing major. Everything went really well, actually.
Pete sailing an F18 on SF Bay in 2010
SR:
Were there any parts of the design for the 72, that you took from some of the smaller cats that you’ve designed over the years?
PM:
Absolutely. We learn a ton from the smaller boats, and as you know, the hull shape evolution over the last ten or fifteen years has come from small boats, at least the concepts. With an America’s Cup Campaign, you obviously have more people and tools to drill down much deeper into why things work. So we’re kind of taking known concepts and trying to understand them better, and then build new, better, faster shapes and ideas.
SR:
Conversely, do you think that any of the design concepts that you’ll take from the 72 will trickle back down to a new generation of smaller cats?
PM:
For sure, it goes both ways. Even from the cruising boats and powerboats, we’ll pick up another piece of the big unknown puzzle, and it helps us understand the big picture better.
SR:
When you launch the AC72 on Saturday, what are the areas where people can look to find some of the innovation that your team has designed into the boat?
PM:
It’s really about the…There are two areas that I can think of. Looking as the entire concept as a whole, rather than focusing on the hull shape, or the beam configuration, or whatever. The major thing to get right in any boat design is the entire package. How all of the parts function as a whole. You can have a great hull shape, but you get the dagger boards in the wrong place, or a poorly cut sail, then the boat is just not going to perform. There are a lot of details that aren’t evident from 50 meters away, you can’t really see where a lot of the innovation is. A lot of it is pretty simple. Certainly photos are coming out of the wing now, and I’ve seen a few people on various websites pick out some of the details. It’s starting to become evident, but I can’t say a whole lot. We think that we have a pretty good all around package.
One of the major things is that the courses are short, so the team is going to be doing a maneuver in sometimes less than two minutes, and they’re fairly shore handed, so the layout of the boat has to be fairly easy to manage. Our boat has cockpits in either hull, and we’re not sure what our competitors are doing, but there are different solutions to the problem. It’s exciting! This is the first generation of this class, so we’re likely to see a wide variation of ideas and concepts out there. Everyone is going to think that they’re right, but not everyone’s going to be (Laughs).
SR:
You’ve sailed F18s and many other boats in the San Francisco Bay, so you know what it can be like out there. What sorts of things did you take into account when designing the AC72, knowing that these boats are going to be sailed in the fairly brutal San Francisco Bay?
PM:
Well certainly all of our performance analysis from the wings, and hulls, and appendages is targeting the San Francisco Bay wind strengths, wave conditions, and also this specific course that we’re going to be operating on. So, say you were going to be designing a boat for a much lighter air venue, I would certainly rethink the boat as far as the structures go, the wing shapes, and the foils go. It would all be optimized to a completely different range of conditions. We think our boat is going to be a great boat in breezy conditions. In the wave state, and the sort of speeds we’re going to be operating at, the hull shapes, the wing shapes, and the foil shapes are absolutely critical for getting the best performance at those speeds. I can’t really say much more, but I think it’s going to be really exciting.
Stand by for part 2 on the power catamaran...
