Cup Spy: "We need 2 kts more or we're gone" - Ainslie

by Richard Gladwell/Sail-World NZ 17 Feb 22:01 GMT

Sail-World sat down with Hamish Willcox in November to cover the busy 2024 sailing year and get his analysis of the 2024 SailGP season, the 2024 Olympics in Marseille, the 2024 Louis Vuitton and America's Cups in Barcelona. Here we look at the Louis Vuitton Cup final and the performances of the top two Challengers

In the first part of the interview, we covered why Emirates Team New Zealand was able to successfully defend the America's Cup against the late-developing INEOS Britannia. In this second part we cover the Challenger Finals for the Louis Vuitton Cup - why they panned out the way they did, and why INEOS Britannia was so formidable, and the issues in the AC75 setup that were not obvious the the viewing audience.

Recap: After the French challenger Orient Express was eliminated at the end of the Round Robin phase, four teams contested the semi-finals of the Louis Vuitton Cup.

Swiss Challenger Alinghi Red Bull Racing was a new team, but with some of the management from Ernesto Bertarelli's last America's Cup efforts in 2003-2010. Sailing an interesting design, the Swiss looked a little off the pace or had not made the same progress as the other three teams in the final months leading into the Cup.

American Magic had been performing well in the run-up to the Semi-Finals. However, skipper Paul Goodison was injured in a fall on the penultimate day of the Round Robins and struggled to get their well-honed combinations running with substitute helmsman Lucas Calabrese, who had only a few hours AC75 experience. With the Semi-Finals starting five days after the end of the Round Robins, it was a big ask to switch in a new co-helmsman with the other teams applying the finishing polish to their Cup preparations.

Against that backdrop, the Challenger Final was expected to be between Luna Rossa Prada Pirelli, the 2021 America's Cup Challenger. They'd taken three wins off Emirates Team NZ after six races in Auckland. The other Challenger Final contestant in Barcelona was expected to be the big volume hulled INEOS Britannia.

The Brits still looked a little sticky in the light. Their strong point was in the moderate to fresh breeze, where they could drive the big boat hard and fast. The combination of co-helms Ben Ainslie, sailing in his fifth America's Cup campaign, and first-timer Dylan Fletcher was working well despite Fletcher's late promotion into the role.

The Brits had developed momentum midway through the Round Robin phase, but not enough to win the series outright. However, they won a sail-off with Luna Rossa to decide who would top the Round Robin points table and have the choice of their Semi-Final opponent. The Brits picked the Swiss and had an easier run to the Final.

Luna Rossa had the speed but lost some momentum after dropping races through hydraulic failure, coming off their foils and suffering a structural failure with their traveller in the Semi-Finals.

Own Goals

The Italians gifted two races to the British team in the Louis Vuitton Cup Final. The Italians were disqualified for infringing an outside assistance rule over a mainsail hoisting issue before the start of Race 3. They suffered a spectacular nosedive in Race 7, which blew up deck fairings.

With the Brit's form and momentum, a couple of own goals in the best of 13 race Final was always going to be hard to overcome.

Hamish Willcox was on the coaching team for Luna Rossa. He was ideally placed to see the rise of the British Challenger and to have an insider's view of the Luna Rossa campaign, which had built steadily in its seventh attempt to win the America's Cup.

Asked if he agreed that the Italians made their task more difficult by gifting two races to the British.

"We surely did that," he told Sail-World.

If we look back, fresher winds were the Brit's best condition. And the Kiwis probably would have struggled a bit against INEOS in a breeze, as well.

"And when the waves got to a metre, I think their boat was very stiff, and they could use the hull a bit more. So that was certainly their sweet spot."

"The Brits learned really fast. They were on a roll. And that mindset, as we know, is worth a lot."

Momentum was a frequently used word by the British team in their public debrief after each race day on "Inside Tack".

"Looking back, you wouldn't have given them a chance at the start of the Round Robins even to make the Semi-Finals," Willcox remarked.

"So their rate of improvement was really good. You have to take your hat off to the whole team for pushing so hard and being able to roll the dice if you like - and take more risks."

"We started so well at the beginning, but we were more of the mindset of taking baby steps and steady continued improvement, but certainly nothing like the rapid improvement that the INEOS guys went after."

Skating on ice

"They had a lot of people in the team. They definitely had more firepower than we did in terms of being able to observe and then re-program the boat, even between races. They could look at some of the mechatronics and go."

"Once the race was over, they could start immediately re-programming the boat from Brackley where the team was based."

"In hindsight, we just didn't have that same sort of firepower behind us to make all the observations needed and ruthlessly go after those performance gains."

Willcox believes the British team made most of their gains before the Finals. When they came up against the Italians, the INEOS Britannia crew were comfortable with their setup and understanding of the boat.

'Trade-off', the word so often used in America's Cup design circles was again to the fore in Barcelona as the teams each tested their solution. The occasional skid sideways was occasionally seen in a too-sharp mark rounding as the foil arms lost their grip on the water.

"The varying approaches to the design and size of the foil arms (boots) was interesting," Willcox recalls. "Some teams exploited the minimum size permitted and occasionally got found out."

"It's hard to comprehend how an AC75 platform could ride on such a narrow arm."

"I liken it to sailing on ice; one minute, your skates are on, and you are carving nicely, and the next minute, your skates are off, and you are sliding and skidding every which way.

"Designers had to find the sweet spot where boats could still be manoeuvred but were still fast enough."

However it wasn't an easy path to the Challenger Finals for Ainslie's team.

"At the start of the Round Robins. Ben threw all his toys before the Round Robins. And we heard on the grapevine that he said, "If we can't find 2kts, we're going to be heading home."

And that's how it looked whenever we sailed with them, with the splits and stuff, we could see they were very slow in every condition. And they were able to make rapid improvement - somehow between the start of the round robins and the early preliminary regattas and the finals."

The Brits rapidly improved to beat the Italians in their final encounter in the Qualifiers, to top the points table and become entitled to select their opponent in the Semi-Finals. They chose the Swiss team, Alinghi, leaving Luna Rossa the more challenging match against third-placed American Magic.

Mechatronic reduction?

Although nothing has been announced on changes to the AC75 class for the 38th America's Cup, Willcox would like to see the degree of sailing automation through mechatronics use restricted and for more emphasis on sailors' skills. Currently, the AC75 class has four sailors and four cyclors to power all above-the-waterline systems.

Some, above Willcox's pay scale, have aired the view that for the next Cup, there should be more reliance on battery power, and with the sailor numbers being increased accompanied by less reliance on mechatronics, where one adjustment by a sailing crew member, will trigger a sympathetic, automated adjustment of several others.

"It's interesting how things evolve. There's always going to be a different thing next time," Willcox says. "I'd like to think they'll take away some of the rules around the linkages. Currently, the sailors are flying the boat because autopilots are not allowed under the rule. But everything else is potentially computer sailed.

"It would be nice to think that they took all that away, and from a TV perspective, you would be able to see the sailors sailing the boat. If they took away all that viewer-invisible linked length stuff, the Kiwis would still have an advantage going into the next Cup.

Ahead of the last Cup, the rumour was that the Kiwis extended the scope of mechatronic use as they felt that there was some advantage they could exploit.

Willcox agrees." Yes, they did, but it opens the chequebook wider. And next time, if you want to run a lean campaign [and encourage new teams], restricting multi-function mechatronics would be a good way to go.

Next up, we'll continue with the America's Cup and also look at why/how Luna Rossa Prada Pirelli were able to win both the UniCredit Youth and Puig Womens America's Cups.

A successful year:

Hamish Willcox is one of the world's most successful sailors, coaches and analysts.

Crewing for David Barnes, he won three consecutive 470 World championships. Since then, Hamish has coached at nine Olympic Games for three nations, assisting sailors to four Silvers and two Gold medals. He moved across to coaching for Great Britain in the 470 classes, winning Olympic medals before moving to the America's Cup teams as a weather strategist for Luna Rossa and then as a coach for Emirates Team New Zealand while continuing to coach Olympic champions.

In 2024, he worked with Luna Rossa as an America's Cup coach and with the Spanish SailGP team, which won the 2024 SailGP Grand Final and the $2million purse.

Willcox continued coaching Diego Botín and Florian Trittel (ESP) to win the Gold medal in the 49er class in Barcelona 2024, before resuming a coaching role with Luna Rossa - which in addition to the Italian's AC75 program also involved coaching the winning crews in the inaugural Womens' America's Cup and the Youth America's Cup, from Luna Rossa.

In December 2020, he combined with a top sailing journalist, Andy Rice, to launch the successful Road to Gold coaching program, which captures the experiences of Willcox and other contributors into a coaching and development program for racing sailors at all levels, including a Junior program to be launched in 2025.