F1 Max Verstappen and Adrian Newey at the Alinghi RedBull base in Barcelona

It has been a busy weekend for Alinghi Red Bull Racing who have been hosting a string of stars who were in Barcelona for the latest round of the Formula 1™ World Champions at the Circuit de Catalunya. The link-up with Red Bull, the current Constructors’ and Driver world champions, was more than evident on Thursday when Max Verstappen and ace British designer Adrian Newey were hosted by Ernesto Bertarelli, Marcelino Botin and Arnaud Psarofaghis and it continued through the weekend with Australian former driver Mark Webber at the base and a visit from F1™ CEO Stefano Domenicali.

Arnaud Psarofaghis was at the race as a guest of Red Bull but wasn’t the only America’s Cup helmsman being treated to trackside hospitality and pit-lane access as New York Yacht Club American Magic’s Tom Slingsby was also pictured as a guest of the sponsors and the Alpine F1 team.

With so much action offsite, and very little wind out on the America’s Cup racetrack, the team managed one brief commissioning session with their AC40 in one-design mode, AC40-7, on Saturday. Unfortunately, with wind speeds barely registering on the anemometer above 5 knots, the team simply couldn’t get the AC40 into sustained flight, and similar to the session with Max Verstappen and the AC75 earlier in the week, the team had to call it a day.

The lack of sailing though afforded the recon team the chance to quiz Nathan Quirk, Alinghi Red Bull Racing’s Sail Loft Manager and Sail Designer, to delve into the thinking behind the current Swiss sail set-up. On the team’s LEQ12 AC40 we have already seen an impressive new mainsail and a new J1 jib with a very light set-up and plenty of exquisite detailing in the overall lay-up. Speaking about the programme, Nathan commented: “Well they reduced a lot the number of sails we can build, so that puts an emphasis on utilising maximum range for every sail, I guess that's going to be the secret, these boats are pretty sensitive to sail areas but that's what we found with the AC75 out in New Zealand last time so you’re going to have to have the right code on at the right time, it's going to be the big thing and if you if you get stuck here your sail’s going to have to go through a wider range than before.”

Talking about the possibility for sail innovation, Nathan added: “Well no one knows what people are doing in the bottom, in the lower zone, and the upper zone doesn't exist anymore, you can't have anything up there so we’ll see, we’ll see what someone comes up with… so in terms of control systems or whatnot especially the upper zone, it's really coming down to small details and refinements that’s that we're looking at.”

Alinghi Red Bull Racing have blocked out a full five days of training this week so plenty to come from the hard-driving Swiss as they ramp up their training ahead of the full arrival in Barcelona at the beginning of July of all the other America’s Cup teams.