The Italians were on a charge over the morning session, starting out with straight-line foil testing and deploying the entire playbook of pitch and cant angles, including a noticeable stern-down trim downwind, and pushing hard over a short-course racetrack perfecting devastating bear-aways and nailing their tacks and gybes. This was almost demonstration sailing and more than proves that the team have quickly come to grips with the new V3 foil that initially was a handful to master. These are big, valuable days for the Italian team and they looked utterly sublime in the flatter waters and Mistral morning breeze.
As one of the world’s truly great foiling sailors, Francesco Bruni is always an interesting interviewee and when asked by the recon team whether he could feel a difference between the port V3 foil and the starboard version 1 foil that the team have benchmarked all iterations against to date, and in particular the leeway profile of the foils, he responded: “Well there will always be a difference between the foils on leeway it's one of the biggest questions when you test and if you have slightly different foils it's very likely that you will have a slightly differently leeway. Having said that there are many ways to change that (cant/pitch etc) but if you have different foils you can expect different leeways, but there's not a magic recipe, there's not a magic number that is better than another one.”
An interesting observation made by Michele Melis of the recon team, himself a yacht designer, was that Luna Rossa Prada Pirelli had a leeway differential of just one percent from course at the last America’s Cup in the Match against Emirates Team New Zealand, and Francesco sees this pattern continuing. When asked if there was a difference between the new foils on the scaled down LEQ12 and what we can expect when this profile is translated up to the one-build AC75, Francesco responded: “No not much to be fair. If you do a mistake you start sliding to leeward but overall I don't see huge differences, the boat proportionally is a little bit lighter than the last Cup, it will be like the AC75 lighter than at the last Cup but with bigger foils, so I don't I don't expect huge differences.”
Where the Italians are making considerable gains is in their race training where they pitch the LEQ12 against the endless power of their Chase Catamaran with Gilberto Nobili driving the team into making fast decisions in awkward situations. It’s valuable training in communication and big picture sailing with Marco Gradoni impressing immensely and Francesco Bruni delivering.
Gradoni’s judgement of time-on-distance is next level stuff, and this young winner of the World Sailor of the Year and three-time Optimist World Champion is pushing hard for a place in the starting line-up – for sure he will have a very big role in the Italian Youth AC Team and looks certain to be a big name in the America’s Cup in the future. Fantatsic to see the youth coming through at the apex of sailing and all credit to the Luna Rossa management team for encouraging Marco through at pace and giving him such valuable time in the boat.
Another stunning day for Luna Rossa with a total foiling time of 87 minutes over a three-hour morning session and a near-perfect record of tacks and gybes being foil-to-foil or touch & go. Impressive all round.