Third time lucky

Francesco de Angelis tells James Boyd about the evolution from Prada to Luna Rossa

Winners of the Louis Vuitton Cup in 2000, expectations were high for the Prada team, the Challenger of Record, going into the 2003 America's Cup. With an impressive roster of personnel both on the sailing and design teams that seemed to be leaving no stone unturned in their development program. They had acquired the Young America boats, USA53 and 58 in addition to their already proven ITA45 and 48.

Yet come the 2003 Louis Vuitton Cup the new Italian boats were clearly off the pace as in the first round robin they won four races, but also lost four. In record time a new bow for ITA74 was cobbled together and the keel replaced. In the next round series leaders, Alinghi, chose to race Prada and after going 3-0 down the Italians chose to withdraw prematurely to make further substantial modifications to their boat - this time another new bow and further optimisation of the mast and appendages. In the quarterfinals the results began to look more promising with a 4-0 defeat over Victory Challenge but the team were finally kicked into touch in the semi-finals by OneWorld.

The Italian team left Auckland uncertain of where it had all gone wrong, rumours rife that that was the last we would be seeing of the Prada campaign.

"At that time Prada was not going to be involved again," skipper Francesco de Angelis takes up the story. "So I came back home and I had two options: one was to exploit the opportunities I might have outside of Italy and the other one was to keep the things I felt we had learned with two campaigns with Prada and make a new team.

"I took the risk of investing time in the second opportunity but I wanted to make a new team where going to work I would feel I was in a new place. So changes were made in all the different departments from the sailing team, the design team, shore team and the organisation and also at a sponsorship level."

After 18 months of negotiations spearheaded by de Angelis, the new Luna Rossa team was born. Prada once again is involved as a main sponsor - and the team were able to acquire the assets of their two previous campaigns in the process - but this time Prada share the principle sponsor stage alongside Telecom Italia and its three brands, mobile phone company TIM, ISP Alice (pronounced Aliche) and a foundation run by Telecom Italia to support sport and culture in Italy.

Luna Rossa's budget for their 2007 Cup campaign is 85 million Euros. De Angelis says he cannot confirm whether this is more or less than Prada spent in 2003, but we suspect it is marginally less. This time round a Cup campaign will cost more money, says de Angelis - it is in Europe where the cost living, communications, labour, etc is more expensive and there are the additional Acts that will require theri whole circus to travel more. Equally he acknowledges that these are justified as they gain more exposure and there is some truth in money can be saved in Cup campaigns, through simply having done it before - provided mistakes are not made.

One of the problems with Luna Rossa in 2003 was that having made it through to the America's Cup in 2000 and with a generous budget, they may have been resting on their laurels. De Angelis says that money is not the only key to winning the America's Cup - you also need the ideas and one will not work without the other. Equally while experience is essential, you also have keep an open mind and be receptive to the new environment (Valencia) and any changes that might be going on (other team's design).

De Angelis clearly recognises that there were problems with the last Prada campaign and in creating the new Luna Rossa team has been attempting to prevent these from reoccurring.

"The two campaigns were very different," says de Angelis comparing the 2000 and 2003 Prada challenges. "The second was a much more difficult campaign, with a lot of pressure and expectation but somehow I think the problem was that the group was not able to translate into reality all the projects and the ideas that they had and so we were late in many things. So we found ourselves modifying the boat during the racing period. That put a lot of load on the whole organisation at a time when we should have just been focussed on the racing."

In the pressure cooker environment at the time there were also personnel issues, that saw both Gavin Brady and Doug Peterson leaving the campaign. "When things don’t work the easiest thing is to point the finger and find a scape goat," continues de Angelis. "But in reality it is a big group of people working together and there may be many things that may not have worked at the same time. That is a lesson you have to learn and unfortunately when it happens you learn it the hard way. Of course, this is a team sport and when you get a result it is a team result and when you don’t it is the same."

While the Luna Rossa is certainly new in many ways, de Angelis says that he couldn't start with a completely clean sheet of paper and ignore the two previous campaigns. "I didn’t want to do anything new for the sake of saying it was new. What we built in the past was investment and you don’t want to redo that. So there is a balance of if it is good I keep it, if it’s bad I change it."

On the design team de Angelis has retained a core group from the last campaign: yacht designer Claudio Maletto, structural designer Andrea Avaldi, British experimental fluid dynamics expert and wind tunnel specialist Ian Campbell and EFD colleague Giorgio Provinciali, sail designer Guido Cavalazzi, technical co-ordinator and deck designer Miguel Costa, components developer and structural engineer Luca Donna, mast specialist Scott Ferguson, design manager and developer Paolo Periotto.

New to the design office are yacht designer Roberto Biscontini (ex Azzurra, Il Moro, Pact95, Young America, BMW Oracle), CFD man Mario Caponnetto (Il Moro), yacht designer Bruce Nelson (ex Stars & Stripes, Young America, AmericaOne, OneWorld) and his appendage designer Winfried Feifel, sail designer Henrik Soderlund and CFD assistant Evan Spong. Grant 'Fuzz' Spanhake is officially part of the sailing team, but also is sail-coordinator and the interface between crew and sail design team.

The green light for Luna Rossa came at the beginning of April at which time the team set up shop in Valencia, the first to do so. De Angelis says that with the Prada's asset they were able to get underway quickly - they simply moved their office building and containers lock, stock and barrel from Punta Ala to Valencia. Sailing began in the beginning of May.

While the first Luna Rossa sailing team in 2000 was entirely Italian (Torben Grael holds an Italian passport), in 2003 it included non-Europeans and for their 2007 campaign they have gone a stage further.

De Angelis has stepped back from being helmsman - his title is now 'Head of Team and Skipper' - and has put the talented young Australian James Spithill behind the wheel. The implication is that de Angelis is taking more of a managerial role along Chris Dickson lines.

"Every day I am in the boat opposite to James, so I am still sailing, I am involved with the boat development and I am racing against him when we train and this time, this race was the first time we were sailing together," says de Angelis. "It is a good opportunity for me to look at things from outside, but I still do a lot of racing and we have different characteristics which we can pass to each other and if we are successful in that we can help the team grow."

The most notable additions to the sailing team are ex-OneWorld. While Spithill comes with his cronies (his equivalent of Russell Coutt's Warwick Fleury, Simon Daubney, Brad Butterworth and Murray Jones) in main trimmer Ben Durham, bowman Andy Fethers, traveller Joe Newton, all also at OneWorld, so too came the McKee brothers, tactician Charlie and main trimmer Jonathan, and Alan Smith who returns to Prada having sailed with them in 2000.

Also in the afterguard are Olympic sailor Francesco Bruni, Steve Erickson, navigator Michele Ivaldi and fellow navigator Matteo Plazzi.

So have the lessons been learned? While Luna Rossa finished second in Act 2 (they did not compete in Act 1 in Marseille) their performance was enough to leave few in doubt that they will be one of the frontrunning challengers come the Cup proper in 2007.