nigelt

iTrader: (10)

While motorsport sees interesting incremental gains year over year, professional sailing has seen an incredible inflection point due to new technology. No competition exemplifies that more than the America's Cup.

In 2007 the average top speed at the America's Cup was about 10 knots, or about 12mph. They looked like this:

Cool applications of materials, and as a development class (box rulebook) there has always been a big design component pushing the boats to be faster and more maneuverable.

For the 2013 Cup the race moved to catamarans (two hulls instead of one) with rigid wing sails instead of the soft material you see above. That alone was enough to more than double the speed of the boats intended to be built with the rule set. However the plucky team New Zealand found a way within the rules to make the boat sail above the water on hydrofoils. The race only happens every 4 years, with tons of design time between, and the foiling capability of the New Zealand boat wasn't revealed until late in the cycle. It was such a badass move, forcing the other competitors to scramble to figure out how to make their boats foil as well. It was an incredible feat of design and engineering, doubling again the speed potential of the boat, and the New Zealand challenger handily crushed the competition until the final races. As the best-of-nine finals were playing out, New Zealand beat the American team in the first eight races. With nearly limitless funding, the American team, backed by Larry Ellison, with design support from Boeing, increase the potential of their boat fast enough through the series, with nightly rebuilds of major systems, that they went on to win the next nine races, winning the Cup. For you sports geeks, that's the biggest comeback in the history of all professional sport. The top speed of the "boats" in the finals was 47 knots in only 20 knots of wind speed. That's a massive 4x+ increase in top speed in a sport in just 6 years.
I was fortunate enough to be living in San Francisco at the time, where the racing was taking place, and got to see the action up close from my own boat and from the shore. The boats looked like this:


An especially interesting feature of the competition is that the winner gets to write the rulebook for the next series, and host it in their own country. The Kiwis won it back in a relatively uneventful 2017 series, and massively changed the ruleset again. They chose foiling monohulls (back to one hull), and released the ruleset with only computer generated images to suggest it was possible to sail boats built to the new rules. Pundits weren't sure it would even produce a boat that could be reasonably sailed.

They would normally do a bunch of lead up regattas, but because of the complexity of the new design nobody was ready to race in 2019, and COVID shut down the 2020 event calendar. Thankfully, the host country is COVID-free, and all the teams set up shop there a few months back, so the first racing started this past Wednesday. This series has been nothing short of incredible as the four teams have been going head-to-head in surprisingly close, tactical racing while they figure out how to sail these unruly boats. While last cycle the boats were doing 47 knots in 20 knots of breeze, they are now hitting those speeds in only 12 knots of breeze. This warm-up regatta wraps up tomorrow, and then the teams get a couple of weeks to tear down their boats, apply as many design changes as they can, and rebuild before the main event kicks off in mid-January.
The boats now look like this:



This is an event that only happens every 4 years or so, so now is an excellent time to pay attention. In many parts of the world you can catch the action streaming live on youtube. In 'merica, you'll need to watch on NBC or just stick to the highlights at /americascup. Race 12 today was a good one to check out - that's towards the end of day 3 of the America's Cup World Series. I'll post a link to the highlights when they go up.

Even if you know nothing about sailing, or if you think it's a pompous past time for obnoxious elites, if you are interested in aerodynamics, cutting edge technology, and rule maximizing design, you should keep an eye on this event for the next few weeks. As a bonus, you get to see a world where it's summer and COVID doesn't exist.

DNMakinson

iTrader: (3)

Allow me to be the first to issue a PosCat. That was an interesting report. Thanks for the read.
DNM

EDIT: Are there now fewer crew members? Are there computer / power controllers used / allowed?

Erat

iTrader: (5)

I have always watched the sail boat racing. But this is totally new news to me that the former winner gets to pick the rules. That seems like a horrible idea, yet it works. I never knew the reasoning for such radical changes in design in such a short amount of time. I guess it's possible when it's all funded by the super wealthy.

It's cool to see their influence from other forms of racing, with the hydrofoil design. Boats go faster when they're not in the water.

nigelt

iTrader: (10)

There is still an athletic component. You've got half a dozen brutes grinding what look like old school winches the entire race, and with two races a day they get swapped out between races like football players on the field. But really what they are doing is manually pressurizing the hydraulic system.

The entire boat has to be human/wind powered, so they can't have like a big generator or anything. They have computer systems that adjust foil height, sail control, etc such that one of the key people (trimmer, helmsman) can make an adjustment to boat trim height, sail twist, or some other optimization, and dozens of sub-systems will be computer adjusted. They can't have any help from shore during a race, but they have tons of sensors onboard streaming data back to shore with a big shore team, and between races they can do software updates.

nigelt

iTrader: (10)

There have been years where the entire thing degrades into lawsuits based on the original 1851 document (the deed of gift) like Republicans and Democrats squabbling over the constitution. So much so, that the actual sailing might be delayed by years, or teams spend hundreds of millions based on a specific rule set that gets tossed out.

Another strange structure to the race is that the winner from 4 years prior (the defender) only races one other boat. There is a lead up regatta where all the other boats (the challenger) compete amongst themselves for the right to race the defender.

The convention now, which has been working for the last few cycles, is that the rule set is made in negotiation with one challenger, who represents all challengers to make sure the rules are fair.

nigelt

iTrader: (10)

The best race of the series so far is here, start at about 3:12:00 What makes this race exciting is that the competitors (New Zealand and Italy) are pushing the limits of the boats on the low end of the wind spectrum. The speeds they are able to achieve are just unheard of - 5x the windspeed. Just 20 years ago sailing faster than the wind speed was rarely achieved. On the bottom end of the wind spectrum they teams are struggling to stay foiling through maneuvers, which makes for a real nail biter.

Today's racing starts at 6pm pacific, and the live stream is here for those outside the US:

DeerHunter

Very entertaining and quite a sea change (sorry) in technology/technique. I haven't watched an America's Cup race since the trump card was when you deployed your spinnaker. Thanks.

good2go

iTrader: (2)

None of the videos are working.

Spaceman Spiff

Such a great round of the cup! Very exciting on the engineering side as well as the sailing. Active hydrodynamic control surfaces on the foils, control systems for different maneuvers to adjust fly height and rake let alone real-time race strategy. And that doesn't even get into the hydro vs. aero tradeoffs everyone seems to have made with boat #2 (what they're all currently sailing).

#1 NZ

#2 NZ


Also crazy is how much power the grinders have to generate to the battery to run all the telemetry and controls in addition to the hydraulics in the foils and the main sail (which has two adjustable soft skins stretched over a frame to make the airfoil).

So far 10/10 Christmas racing. Having seen the last gen fly by up close on the sf bay in 25 kts (sup nigel), I cannot imagine how surreal it would be to see the new AC75s fly by at 60 MPH in 12-15 kts of breeze.

P.S. if you've got a VPN the free youtube live stream is not locked up in Canada.

nigelt

iTrader: (10)

Yesterday was bust because the wind was too light. For the finals in March, the wind is expected to be on the lower end of the range. It was interesting how important the lift off wind speed was, and I bet the teams redesign their foils to optimize for that.

acedeuce802

iTrader: (1)

Americas cup definitely is super cool! My company worked a lot with one of the teams and I did some testing on some clutches we designed for them, pretty cool how much money and R&D could go into light weighting just a little clutch. Then we got to see the feeder race in Chicago a few years back.

nigelt

iTrader: (10)

That's awesome. It's so fascinating how the design and engineering is brand new, ground up every few years. So much creativity involved and huge budgets. It's also neat that any [heinously wealthy] person can start a team, unlike many professional sports. It would be so cool to work on.

nigelt

iTrader: (10)

The next series is kicking off right now:

Erat

iTrader: (5)

So all team america had to do was round the corner and cross the finish line. How did they screw that up so badly. Guess they aren't going to get it fixed by Fridays race. I suppose these have more critical electronics that aren't very liquid proof than I imagined.

Spaceman Spiff

Press conference with Terry Hutchinson shed some light. Tack- bear away is always a tough maneuver regardless of boat, and he essentially said going into the mark rounding before they tacked they were seeing ~14 kts true wind speed, as they tacked a puff came that brought it up to 18 kts, and by the time they were trying to bear away fast enough to not overpower the boat they were seeing 23 kts of wind. Just a big puff at the wrong time, but of course they could have gybed and then beared away and kept the tactical advantage.

Seems they've already ultrasound'ed the hull and are happy about odds of patching it easily, bigger challenge is transplanting the foil cant system from their boat 1 (Defiant) to to Patriot and rewiring pretty much the entire boat, but from what I gather Luna Rossa and NZ are both donating spares. Timeline I heard was 11 days -- so in time for the semi finals but not next weekends racing.

Crazy stuff, and a crazy capsize. Just goes to show how difficult it is to balance wind pressure with the righting moment of the foils on these things. Terry mentioned it being much riskier to "let off the gas" so to speak than it is to keep it 9.9/10 all the time.

nigelt

iTrader: (10)

This is true. On any boat there are a number of things each crew member needs to do when tacking, and a number of things each crew member needs to do when bearing away, and the whole thing needs to be choreographed. If you are doing one maneuver at a time, you can count it down. Then everyone knows their part, they execute, and the boat trim can be dialed in and stabilized before counting down the next maneuver. It's like if you have one guy on the right rear wheel gas, one guy on the left rear wheel gas, one guy on the brakes and one guy on the wheel. Much easier to get all four dudes doing the right things at the right time at race pace going around a single sweeper than a double hairpin.

Now, in a high performance boat it's even more extreme. The zone where the boat is 90 degrees from the wind is where it's most powered up. When you pass through that zone, sail trim and boat trim are super important in order to keep the boat balanced, and you want to cut through that zone as quickly as possible when the breeze is up. A change in boat speed or in the amount of wind each require changes to steering and sail trim, and in this case, foil trim, and each of those controls affects others. So you've got a bunch of guys each trying to dial in their control and infer what others are going to do instinctively. In high-performance boats you get more wipeouts at the top mark than anywhere else on the course.