America's Cup: racing the clock and clocking up the hours

A glassy sea in the harbour heralded a very long day of wind whispering for Emirates Team New Zealand who completed their thirteenth day of training out in Auckland on their brand new AC75 ‘Taihoro.’ Forget the master-blasting of recent sessions, this was a lower range day of sail testing with multiple jib changes up and down the scale as well as testing the M1 and M2-1 mainsail skins with a drone in the sky and plenty of movement onboard as the trimmers jumped out of their pods for better viewpoints of the shapes they are trying to achieve.

LiDAR cameras are capturing everything through these sessions and the matching to performance and outright speed is where the speed differences will be found. Advanced stuff on one level, what can’t be discounted is sailor-feel and with the core group of Peter Burling, Nathan Outteridge, Blair Tuke and Andy Maloney there is ‘feel’ aplenty in this dynamic and into the detail team.

What we also saw in the lighter airs was a persistence with the leeward hull inducement ahead of the tack. As the Kiwis go into the tack, the trimmers pull on and let the boat heel to leeward and it’s quite an ugly but very effective way of getting the maximum speed out of the immersed foil all the way through until the new immersed foil bites. The exit appears to induce windward heel initially and then very quickly the team are trimming to stand on the new immersed foil and get the boat back on the level. High technique but devastating when executed well.

Downwind in the light, the tendency was for higher ride height eschewing the end-plating and this is all for maximum speed – higher equals faster. Over long runs today and plenty of swooping ‘S’ bends, the team looked tight and smooth with a deep camber, and occasionally over-sheeted, mainsail and the trim team were working hard on optimum jib power, dropping in depth quickly in the lulls to keep flying.

Chasing the breeze lines all day, they found some consistency of above 10-12 knots out near the Noises but then harried and towed back to the harbour to catch the emerging north-easterly thermal breeze building off the downtown Auckland cityscape. A long day on the water, dock-out was at 9.33 and they weren’t back ashore until just gone 4pm and coming ashore, Pete Burling was pleased with the day saying: “It was awesome out there today. It was one of the few light days we’ve had so we're really trying to make the most of the bottom end conditions and seeing what a few sails could do, obviously got through a couple of mains as well so it’s always nice to get through a lot of equipment and you know really be able to check things out in one specific band of conditions.”

Racing the clock with an upcoming shipping to Barcelona to factor in, Emirates Team New Zealand have had the hammer down since launch and Pete summed it up saying: “It's been an awesome few weeks, it's been pretty busy, we’re definitely pushing the days on the water in this period so yeah it's been really fast progress for us which has been awesome...we’re always making changes and iterations and that's one of the things with a Cup campaign and with the way our shipping schedule works we've got to make some pretty good decisions coming up pretty soon, so it's been a really great period over the last couple of weeks to learn a lot about the new boat and we’re really loving the whole process.”

An engineering graduate as well as undoubtedly one of the finest sailors to ever emerge from New Zealand, Pete is very much a details person. Talking about the down-range nature of today and how they mode the boat when under-powered, he commented: “We always try to get range out of these sails, makes your life a little bit easier but we were just sailing with them in what we got there really and were quite lucky to get as nice a breeze as we did out quite wide chasing that dying kind of sou’wester then managed to get a little bit of the nor’easter back in the harbour to finish off the session on the way home, so really productive day.”

The feedback loop continues for the whole team down in Auckland – and we’re still on legacy foils. Interesting days ahead for sure when the new ones come onstream.