Alinghi bag 100

Coveted sail number goes to Swiss defenders

Alinghi, Defender of the 32nd America’s Cup, has been allocated sail number 100, becoming the first America’s Cup Class yacht to have a three digit sail number in the history of the class.

SUI100, the second of two new builds permitted for this campaign, is under construction at Décision Boatyard in Vevey, Switzerland, together with a team of Alinghi boatbuilders and monitored closely by Alinghi shore crew coordinator Michel Marie and yard director Bertrand Cardis. Several members of the design team led by Chief Engineer Dirk Kramers are commuting between the yard in Vevey, the base in Valencia and Dubai, where Alinghi is carrying out a winter training camp.

The relationship between the Swiss Defender and Décision Boatyard is a strong one; the yard built both SUI64, the 2003 America’s Cup winning yacht, and SUI75, the 2005 America’s Cup Class Championship winner. Then in 2006, SUI91 was built and shipped to Valencia. The first of two new boats, SUI91 hasn’t raced the challenger fleet yet and is currently in Dubai with SUI64 where the testing and training programme is underway.
25 boatbuilders are involved in building SUI100, from both the Décision and the Alinghi camps, and the aim is to have the boat finished early in the New Year and ready for the crew to complete structural checks in Valencia and start testing the boat.

Grant Simmer, Managing Director and Design Team Coordinator, comments on progress: "The construction of the second of our new builds for the defence of the 32nd America’s Cup is progressing on schedule. We have put into this design all the information that we have been collecting from the two-boat testing programme that has been underway since 2000 when we started Alinghi.”

Simmer also added a word on a very happy marriage between Alinghi and the Décision SA Boatyard in Vevey: "We enjoy a very productive relationship with Bertrand Cardis’ team at Décision and we benefit from the collaboration and experience both within Alinghi and at the yard. Michel Marie is in Vevey regularly while our head boatbuilder Gary Hutchinson and six other Alinghi boatbuilders are working full time to complete the boat."