Kiwi ingenuity plays big role in America's Cup challenge
New Zealanders are famed around the world for their ingenuity - there’s an old adage that Kiwis can do anything with a piece of fencing wire.
With rules becoming even more restrictive to design an America’s Cup class yacht, it pays to be clever - to develop ideas that no one else has tried, and ideas that work.
That’s where Kiwi ingenuity and New Zealand’s wealth of boatbuilding experience comes to the fore.
When it came to building the 2007 generation boats, NZL84 and NZL92, Emirates Team New Zealand (ETNZ) did not need to go far from their Auckland harbour base to get help and expertise.
The Viaduct Basin is home to some of the world’s leading manufacturers in the boatbuilding trade. Names like Southern Spars, who built the ETNZ rigging, and North Sails, are famous the world over. Cookson Boats, one of the world's leading builders of composite racing yachts, based on Auckland’s North Shore, has built the last six boats for Team New Zealand campaigns.
‘Having the world’s leading manufacturers straight across the road when you’re building a new boat is a huge help,’ says ETNZ design co-ordinator Andy Claughton.
‘You can dip into the experience of the workforce, and they are keen to do a good job on a Kiwi product, so it’s a virtuous circle.’
The cost of building these Formula One-type racing boats is not cheap - a keel alone can set a syndicate back $US500,000 (385,000 Euro). So ETNZ decided to reuse a lot of the hardware from their 2003 Cup boats, and refine it.
‘You just cannot afford to start with a blank sheet of paper,’ says Claughton.
Critics were impressed with ETNZ’s first boat, NZL84, when it made an appearance in the final act in Valencia last year. The narrow boat, with a full bow and slab sides, was strong downwind and an evolution of the leading boats from the last America’s Cup.
It hasn’t been easy. Claughton says the new IACC rule has made it ‘much more restrictive, much more like a One Design class.’
‘We will see conventional developments from what we have seen before - nothing surprising. At every turn, the rules prevent you from doing anything too clever, so it’s been a matter of refining and refining; improving your detailing in every way,’ he says.
The sailing conditions in Valencia are markedly different to those in Auckland - with lighter airs - so the hull design leans towards narrower boats, to keep the wetted surface to a minimum. Claughton expects the biggest development area in this Cup to be sails.
‘The big difference for us this time has been the chance to measure ourselves against the opposition, which we didn’t get as the defender. The acts have been good in that respect, they’ve given us a focus to work towards in the short term. But it made the build-up quite a bit more stressful - always having to be ready to race,’ he says.
Passionate Kiwi supporters keen to see the America’s Cup back on their shores have also been offering plenty of advice to the ETNZ design team on how to make the boats go faster.
‘We get bombarded by emails from punters in the street who have ideas for us,’ Claughton says. ‘We always listen to them, because one day it might just be an idea that works.
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