After the disappointment yesterday of a session cut cruelly short by a blown inspection hatch on the port foil of Alinghi Red Bull Racing’s much modified AC40-4, today saw the Swiss team bounce straight back with a brilliant, thrilling, mesmerising afternoon of two boat action out on a perfect Barcelona.
Flat water and 20 knots of breeze greeted the two AC40’s, with AC40-4 running a new mainsail on its first commissioning day – the M1-2LE – which replaces the earlier upgrade that the team declared. AC40-7 meanwhile sailed in one design mode and the team are yet to swap in foils to this boat as we have seen NYYC American Magic do with their two boats ‘America’ and ‘Magic’ but for sure that’s coming as Adolfo Carrau, Design Co-Ordinator, intimated yesterday.
For today it was pure boat-on-boat action with everything from desperately close manoeuvres, pre-starts, spin-outs and even a capsize on AC40-7 for good measure, all executed at breakneck speed with the whole team operating an incredibly high level. Nico Charbonnier, 470 bronze medallist from the 2006 Beijing Olympic Games, really summed up the day, absolutely buzzing from the experience helming AC40-4 saying: “This is what we are waking up every morning for and it couldn't be any better, we had a flat sea state and 20 knots of breeze and the boats are just insanely fast and yeah it's great.”
Some early technical issues on the port foil area of AC40-4 were quickly resolved and what looked like an issue on the pure one-design AC40 right at the end of the session saw the team being towed back into base – no surprise considering just how hard the team were driving all day - and Nico updated on both saying: “I don't think we had any issue on the port foil, it was just we didn't do good manoeuvres but was good otherwise and the foil worked really well. And I don't exactly know but the second boat had a capsize, so I think something wasn't working anymore due to the capsize and we just came in because it was more efficient for the team to be doing the working on the two boats.”
Dean Barker had joined Maxime Bachelin on AC40-7 in one-design mode and their capsize was downwind straight after a short lunch break. Arnaud Psarofaghis and Nico Charbonnier continued the session really dialling into their port foil and taking a good look at the new mainsail iteration. In total, they completed some four and a half hours on the water in top-end breeze, foiling for some 125 minutes and interestingly resorting to two-board down bear-aways that trimmer Nico Rolaz intimated were ‘safer and just as fast’ in a recent interview – certainly as the breeze gets up, stability is paramount and it’s a logical playbook to initiate.
Asked to draw any early conclusions on the new mainsail, Nico quite rightly offered a diplomatic answer on this its first day on the boat, saying: “It’s not that I don't want to answer this one but it's early days, today with the sails. I think it was the direction the designer wanted to go but it's still really early to get conclusions, was quite windy too, we don’t normally sail in that breeze, so no the good thing was it was really reliable we had no issues and was a good commissioning for the sail, it was good.”
Elsewhere on the Port Vell, INEOS Britannia had hoped to get out in their LEQ12 prototype ‘T6’ today after a very long afternoon of measurement and commissioning yesterday, but it wasn’t to be as a number of technical issues after the boat had been launched pushed back the dock-out time until eventually time was called with the breeze really filling in out of the harbour.
Some interesting tech notes below from Justin Chisholm who has been following the team through the winter period in Palma and is now based in Barcelona with the sighting of a “new LED display situated at the front of the trimmer / flight controller pod. The narrow display runs the width of the cockpit lip and showed a red LED dot moving from side to side – not unlike the display on the AI car ‘Kit’ in the old TV show Knight Rider.” – One for us of a certain vintage but it will be fascinating to see the level of technology that INEOS Britannia will now start bringing forward in this America’s Cup cycle with the influence of Mercedes Applied Science. The Brits have the whole of August marked out in the Recon Calendar for possible sailing so there’s plenty to come from the team in the coming days and weeks.
The forecast in Barcelona for the rest of the week and into the weekend looks stunning with building afternoon breezes from the south and east providing the perfect canvas for testing, evaluation and race training. Plenty to come this week with New Zealand, America, Italy, Britain and Switzerland all planning sailing sessions.