America's Cup, next gen Luna Rossa as Swiss switch

Cagliari has been a busy training venue for Luna Rossa Prada Pirelli this week with the team’s Youth & Women squad members getting plenty of time on the AC40 as they ramp up preparations for an all-out assault on the UniCredit Youth America’s Cup and the inaugural PUIG Women’s America’s Cup. To many, they are the stand-out favourites with so much talent coursing through Italian sailing at the moment, married with a real will from the senior sailors to bring that talent through...fast.

Today, on a choppy Bay of Angels, it was the magnificent opportunity for the younger sailors to get a taste of what life at full throttle is like onboard the team’s super-fast LEQ12 with Marco Gradoni and Francesco Bruni driving hard. Seated in the back seats, on rotation, the Youth & Women’s sailors got to see first-hand just how hard this Italian challenge for the Louis Vuitton 37th America’s Cup really is pushing...and they were more than impressive today.

Over a huge number of pre-starts, where the concentration was on accurate positioning and time-on-distance initially, it was then shaken up with the introduction of the Chase Boat acting as competition. Then over some short-course racing with Team Coach Jacopo Plazzi calling the shots and Paride Bovolenta driving, the Chase Boat team were pushing hard from the comfort of the power controls to keep the sailors on their toes and put them into hard decision-making situations. Electric to watch in practice and a huge skill to execute well. Over a near four hour session with the wind picking up from an initial 10-12 knots and peaking at 13-15 knots, this was another valuable day on the perfect waters of Cagliari.

Vittorio Bissaro, Flight Controller extraordinaire, spoke to the recon team afterwards and summed up the day saying: “It was a very interesting day in Cagliari, we don’t have many opportunities to face the waves during winter, this day was one of the few, so was super-interesting to go out and try and learn something, little tricks, super productive.” Talking about the Chase Boat interference, Vito explained it as: “To put pressure, develop communications...and keep the game tight.”

Vito also spoke about the new AC75 that will launch at the beginning of April with some very interesting comments saying: “For sure, it’s very aggressive, very nice boat, super clean, very nice solution. The LEQ was a development boat, so the intention was not to make the best boat just a nice platform to study while the AC75 is clearly a weapon. We looked at every detail, everything around the package and really looking forward to start sailing with it.”

More to come from the Italians in this intensive and future-looking race-training block. Italy looks very, very good right now.

Out in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, it was a fifth day in a row of sailing for Alinghi Red Bull Racing who are piling the pressure onto their sailing team for improvement. Key to the new impetus has been Dean Barker who brings a whole other level of competitiveness and race-craft, honed from a lifetime on the match-race circuit and the America’s Cup itself.

Dean certainly looks at the pre-start through a different lens and the learnings for the whole team have noticeably up-ticked. Today Dean and Maxime Bachelin looked imperious over a series of starts and with some aggressive protectionist sailing at key moments managed to convert positions into race wins. Arnaud Psarofaghis and Nicolas Charbonnier looked perhaps jaded today, foiling off the foils, gaining an OCS and getting suckered into pressure mistakes – plenty for the team coaches Pietro Sibello and Nils Frei to dissect in the debriefings.

One of the interesting parts of the day was the very last stint where the trim teams swapped with the helms and proved that the skill-sets required to trim are very different to the accuracy required to helm.

A few spectacular nosedives, broaches and falls off the foils were noted with Bryan Mettraux summing up, with a smile, the feelings of the ‘Trimmer’s Union’ saying: “I had the chance to helm for 20 minutes at the end, it was really interesting, I wasn’t helming when we did the nosedive but I think it was good fun for the whole crew to be able to swap and to share our feelings and experience...I think it’s much harder to trim than to helm so I think both times were a trimmer mistake!!”

So much of this Jeddah training camp has been about race-training but there has also been an awful lot of sail testing and with lighter winds in this block than in previous camps, the crossover between the J2 and J3 has been an area of much debate. Bryan summed it up beautifully saying: “I think we’ve seen in the last two days that between the J2 and J3 it’s really close until 10 knots, when it gets a bit stronger it’s better with a J3, below that it’s perhaps a bit better with the J2...straight line looks pretty close and it makes a bit of difference on manoeuvres, we’re still learning which is the best compared to the wind...with the extra wind speed upwind you’re really happy with a small jib at the front and downwind you have less apparent wind so a bigger area makes a difference.”

The hard-driving Swiss have a welcome day-off on Friday before training re-commences through the weekend and into the early part of next week before the team return to AC75 training in Barcelona. Another hugely productive day in the crystal waters of the Red Sea.

Meanwhile in Auckland it was a down-range day on equally crystal summer waters, once the morning rain squalls had evaporated, and the perfect opportunity for Emirates Team New Zealand to test through their trims, flight and foil detail.

Once again, Peter Burling could be seen out on both the port and starboard foil arms, checking the most minute of details on the outboard wings and when asked afterward by the recon team what he's inspecting, he gave an interesting answer: “We’re just trying a few things, checking how they should be, it’s obviously a pretty busy time for us just trying to push through a bit of detail stuff and a few conceptual things but really happy with how the programme is going and unfolding and looking forward to continuing that over the next few weeks.”

Asked about the new AC75, in build at the moment and slated for launch in April, Pete put it all in perspective saying: “It’s exciting now that three teams have declared that they’re going to be launching in the next couple of months, yeah it’s going to be a really interesting time of the campaign to see what people have actually been up to in private behind their own lines and it’s all coming to the pointy end now.”

Emirates Team New Zealand have blocked out the next three days as potential sailing sessions. The grind goes on for the Defenders of the Louis Vuitton 37th America’s Cup.