Valencia's Bastion Blanco

Tim Jeffery attended Saturday's opening of Alinghi's new base in the America's Cup basin

In Auckland it was the ‘Pink Palace’. In Valencia, the ‘Bastion Blanco’ will do. This is new home for the America’s Cup defenders Alinghi, a team that’s exuding confidence and calm.

It’s hard to imagine that 18 months ago that the spat between Russell Coutts and team owner Ernesto Bertarelli was in full spate. Or that 12 months ago that at the first press conference after Coutts had gone, held during the Marseilles Louis Vuitton Act regatta, showed a team that was awkward and uncomfortable.

Then, Bertarelli made Coutts’ best friend and tactician, Brad Butterworth, ‘vice-president’ of the team. This weekend in Valencia, the Alinghi squad was told by their team owner that Butterworth is now their skipper.

This formalises what was happening already on the water and with a fabulously successful 2005 racing season. Victory in all three Louis Vuitton match race Acts and success in two out of three fleet race Acts in which the myriad of improvements to SUI 75 spooked the 11 challengers with her speed, shows that Alinghi is poised and powerful once more.

Look around Valencia's Darsena harbour, the team bases are quite something. Eyesore prize will go to Desafio Español when theirs is finished, unless you like a head-on assault in lime green. Tops for subtley is Luna Rossa’s base, which feted architect and sailor Renzo Piano has clad in super-sized images of sails.

For visual weight, you can’t miss the BMW Oracle base. Its black smoked glass couldn’t be anything other than a car showroom or software HQ premises.

Which is why Alinghi’s Bastion Blanco stands out. It’s sophisticated and understated. The outward leaning front wall immediately separates it from every other base from the road side, and the opening positively invites the public in.

In Auckland, the Alinghi base was the most welcoming to visitors. Yes, part of the reason was to combat the one-eyed Kiwi reaction (remember Black Heart?) to Bertarelli hiring Coutts away from TNZ along with his Tight Five (Butterworth, Simon Daubney, Warwick Fleury, Murray Jones and Dean Phipps), but a powerful reason was to make the public more welcome. At the other bases, the only open door was to the T-Shirt shop.

So the new Blanco Bastion takes this idea further. Much further in fact. For the public there’s an audio-visual information gallery and a cinema with fans and and sound system that gives a real flavour of being aboard. It’s not quite IMAX but the sensation of a being in the midst of a spinnaker drop is uncannily real.

And outside there is heeling, turning and floating simulator. Actually it’s as real to the SUI 64 as you can get. “It’s the wooden plug,” beams boatbuilder Bertrand Cardis of Decision SA who has just finished another interesting project (putting composite panels on an Alp-top antenna building for Swiss Telecom), “so it’s just 30mm undersize!”

An 8 tonne canting keel is cross-wired so that it heels the boat in response to heading and the two wheels and two grinding pedestals and primary drums are proportionate to their loading, all of which is linked to a big flat-screen mounted to show heading and wind direction for upwind sailing. Eleven people at a time can try be a Cup crew.

“The public zone has been built in anticipation of a very large number of visitors,” says Patrick Magyar, currently co-General Manager with Grant Simmer. “The flow through the interactive area and cinema can handle 240-250 people an hour. So on a good America’s Cup day, that will be 2,000-3,000.”

The rest of the base is given over to the Alinghi 'family' (from their 'friends' supporters club, actual family members and corporate guests) or the team itself.

The corporate areas can handle 450 guests a day. Alinghi have utilised their roof space and balconies area to the maximum in this regard and the views are stunning; high enough to observe all in the Darsena and look out to sea.

Over the 60 odd competition days remaining until the end of the 2007 Cup, Magyar expects 14-15,000 corporate guests to have enjoyed Alinghi hospitality. These numbers are the proof of just how different the Cup in Europe is.

Such days are bought by sponsors, with the main supporters having highest priority. They have guaranteed minimums and unused or additional capacity is brokered through a clearing house software program.

Magyar claims the prices are low comprising catering plus 10%. “Normally sports hospitality is a legal black market. You pay 20% for the catering and 80 per cent because the ticket is in a good location. At the FIFA World Cup, the catering is €105 per match but the ticket for the final is going to cost €3-4,000. So that’s 30 times the food value…This is not how we’re doing it. This facility is for our sponsors and suppliers and a limited number of outside people. The costs they are paying are only a couple of hundred Euros and that covers the spectator boats and food. Compare this to the Paddock Club at Formula 1, I’d say we are five to six times cheaper. The value is excellent.”

Pass through the key-coded doors and you are in the inner sanctum. Not many have private offices, though Butterworth shares with Sporting Director Jochen Schumann just as they did in Auckland. It’s not obvious to see how such diverse characters, one a laconic drawling Kiwi and the other a conspicuously polite and correct German, knit together so well, but they do.

Bertarelli has his own private area, and Ed Baird, Peter Holmberg and Warwick Fleury will share an office, but these are exceptions. By and large the sailors and designers share open spaces. “We learnt in Auckland how important this was, for there to be a direct transfer of knowledge between the two in our daily work,”. says Schumann.

Forget any notion that Cup campaigns operate out of converted Portakabins still.
Mike Schreiber has his own sail loft on site, as well as a sail laundry and drying room similar to the Pink Palace. It has a draining floor and so much volume that it’s big enough to hang 16 spinnakers in.

Shore boss Michel Marie, has two boat halls into which each yacht can be driven. Two fold down gangways to each yacht, looked after by Rodney Arden and Francesco Rapetti, act like umbilicals, bringing power, air and dehumidifiers.

There’s a gym as big as many commercial premises. Just the value of kit alone is in the region of $250,000. Official supplier Technogym have added a wall of newly designed resistance machines expressly for the needs of sailors allowing the full range of movement typical of bouncing a halyard or pulling down a sail.

Having spent two years at the Valencia yacht club, split between two sites, Alinghi’s new home will make the team become one again. The atmosphere surrounding Bertarelli’s group says this unity is tangible and bringing everyone together in the same building can only enhance it further.

“We have tried to consider and plan all the needs for the team and I think we have most of them in this building,” says Schumann.

Then he adds a rider, which says so much of Alinghi’s state of mind and state of readiness: “We hope this building is a little bit better than it was in Auckland. The expectations are higher and we have to deliver a little bit more if we are to defend the Cup successfully. We are in a good position to achieve that.”