Future America's Cups in multihulls?

We speak to Brad Butterworth and Murray Jones about this and the Notice of Race for the 33rd AC

A side effect of contesting the 33rd America’s Cup in multihulls capable of never previously seen light wind speeds, will be a very different style of racing to a typical match race in monohulls. To anticipate this Alinghi has conjured up a Notice of Race that it hope takes into account unprecidented issues like 60-70 knot closing speeds between the boats at the leeward gate.

Architect of the present Notice of Race, Brad Butterworth, acknowledges that this document is still a work in progress. For example there is the possibility that the match racing rules won’t be used - there could be no dial ups or dial downs and no pre-start. There is even the chance the boats will start on their own separate lines.

This doesn’t sound much like a match race, we put it to Butterworth? "Well, it is a friendly regatta among nations! But I think both teams are pretty much on the same page. We were trying to work out a way of having good close racing, but trying to keep the boats apart. I think that if you are sitting on them and they are doing 30 knots towards each other...it is hard enough when you are sailing on your own keeping the thing going in the right direction. When the boats are on the free course of course they can tack and gybe where they want and there will still be the same problems when they round marks. But it was really the dial-down or the dial-up which is more difficult on a multihull. We have seen it on the D35s and the 40s when we match raced them. Other than that it is pretty much the same old stuff."

And two separate start lines? "I would think that we’d be open to talk to the other team about that," continues Butterworth. "I think we’ll come to some understanding to keep the boats safe. It might not necessarily be two start lines, but there might be some modifications to Appendix C [the Match Racing rules] that’ll work for both teams. I can’t see that being a big deal. If you keep Appendix C I think you might enter, but you probably can’t stop the boat from sailing past you. You are really just trying to eliminate the dial-down or the dial up."



An added issue, Butterworth points out, is that prior to 8 February neither boat will have ever raced another boat before.

There is of course talk of extending the series, which seems likely to happen. If this goes ahead Butterworth envisages a format similar to the 32nd America’s Cup where there was three laydays amid seven races rather than the Deed of Gift format that alternates race days and laydays.

Shortening the races from the Deed of Gift's 20 mile windward-leeward, followed by a 39 mile triangle and then another windward-leeward, has also been mooted, but Butterworth isn’t keen on this. "The triangle race is not a long way upwind anyway in one of these boats. These boats need to stretch their legs, because this regatta is a design regatta first and foremost, this time more than any other, and the fastest boat will wind up winning. Hopefully the reliability will be the same between the two teams and the boats can finish the regatta, but you want to see the fastest boat win and that will be a reflection of the design and the optimisation, so leaving it at 20 miles I think is a good idea."

Butterworth also thinks it essential to have on the water umpiring to prevent lengthy periods in the protest room. He reckons it is likely that the jury will probably have their hands full on the technical side of the regatta in any case... The question is - how will on the water umpiring work on boats that when they are cranked up in any sort of breeze will be hard to follow in a RIB or a motor boat? Perhaps this could be the first instance of in-the-air umpiring? It is possible for example that they will use on board umpires.

The Notice of Race also states that racing will be held in winds of 5-15 knots and a maximum 1m sea. According to Butterworth this is not just for the start area but for the whole race course. "The boats have a threshold on them and you have to be realistic that we’re sailing them in the winter in Valencia and I think it will be impossible to insure them. I just think realistically 15 knots and 1m is a reasonable threshold for both boats and if it is over that we should call it a day. 1m is pretty big. In Valencia we used to have a threshold on the old AC boats of 1.5m when we wouldn’t go out. So it is bigger than you think."

The case for multihulls in future America’s Cups

To most of the America’s Cup community it is hard to conceive future multi-challenger America’s Cups regularly being held in multihulls. There are some compelling arguments against: multihulls don’t manoeuvre well and so the most of the sport of match racing, as it know it currently, could be consigned to the dustbin. Significantly, for a comparable length, a multihull is also much more expensive than a monohull.

The question boils down to a basic philosophical one. Does the sport evolve or not? To give just one example do we stick with spinnaker poles, because ‘that is the way it has always been done’ or do we move to bowsprits? Surely if there is an arena within our sport where there should be development it should be at the pinnacle and that is the America’s Cup?

If George Schuyler, the writer of the America’s Cup Deed of Gift, were alive today, the fierce bout for the 33rd America’s Cup between two of the world’s richest men in absolute state of the art sailing machines would perhaps be more in line with his ancient vision than the multi-challenger events in more heavily constrained boats designed to ultra-complex box rules that have featured over recent decades.

Alinghi are very much in favour of future America’s Cup being held in multihulls if there is willing from the rest of the community. Even monohull stalwart Brad Butterworth is in favour: "I am enjoying the multihull experience and I think maybe a modified version of what we have here for the future would be a great opportunity to take a step forward. Instead of sailing around in these old boats that are 20 years old, that we painfully go about trying to get a 1/100th of a knot advantage, you can sail these multihulls in lighter air and if the guys that sail on the Cup get hold of these boats they’ll be able to sail them in fresher air as well. If you knew you had to sail in 25 knots you’d be able to sail the boat in 25 knots. You’d have a smaller rig or a smaller sails, whatever and the boats would be going a lot faster and they would be a lot more exciting. My vision of the future would be to see the multihull version of it carry on. I think the multihull road could be a great road for the future."

He continues: "If I look at what Ernesto has spent and what he has had to deal with, I could understand him saying - ‘well I’ve got my boat. If you want to have a go - show up!’ That is totally against what he has been doing in the past, but that is the situation right now. He has had to build this boat and campaign it. But he would love to see more nations challenging. The fact is that for someone to win the America’s Cup in this arena - you have to build a multihull. That says something.”

If the America’s Cup was going to become ultra-elitist and solely the domain of the world's richest, then it could stay in the type of fully unrestrained dragsters we will see on the race course for the 33rd America’s Cup. But the cost is prohibitive. At a guess Alinghi may have spent 100 million Euros on their campaign, but Alinghi reckon BMW Oracle will have spent more than twice what they have. Sailing team member in charge of Alinghi's rig program, Murray Jones does the calculations in his head: "At the end of this Cup, they have five masts one of them a solid wing - which is probably three times the cost of a normal mast - and we will have built two. They have done three major mods to the boat. If they have only spent twice what we have spent then they are being quite economical along the way I would say." BMW Oracle Racing have also spent about a year longer in their preparations for this Cup.



So the feeling within Alinghi is that future America’s Cup could be in smaller, slightly more constrained multihulls. As Murray Jones puts it: "My vision of the AC in the future, it would be great for spectators and the sailors to have a box rule multihull, maybe 80ft LOA, and a mast height and perhaps a righting moment [restrictions], making the boats very even. In a multihull they are the variables which control the speed."

He adds that at this size you could get away without the need for powered winches. "The problem with the boats we have - they are 115ft long and to have the equivalent [of powered winches] you'd have to have 25 grinders on board to be able to sail them around the course as efficiently as we do, which is totally impractical. And the boats would be so heavy that they’d be slow. People who watched the Oracle boat sailing in the last year - they couldn’t trim the sails in because they had manual grinders. You couldn’t race them. If you had two boats with the same power systems as they had, it would almost be pathetic watching them trying to race around the course compared to the two boats now."

80ft he reckons is reasonable size where only a small army of grinders would be necessary to be able to race the boats properly.

For they are sailing the boats in a very different way to the ‘lock and load’ approach typically taken on on the big offshore multihulls - where you set up the trim and then the helmsman steers to it. Jones says that on boats like Groupama 3 and Banque Populaire this is simply because they don’t have the manpower to trim the sails.

But maybe powered winches should stay? Pandora’s Box is already well and truly open in this respect and even within IRC powered winches are evolving down onto smaller and smaller boats, simply because they make manoeuvres faster. Maybe grinders and pedestals are a thing of the past? As Jones puts it with reference to the forthcoming Rolex Sydney Hobart: "If you go and do a 600 miler without powered winches in a 100ft monohull, you are going to be coming home a day later…"

So multihulls for future America’s Cups? Maybe the community isn’t ready for it at present, however it should be noted that even if future America’s Cups were held in state of the art light displacement monohulls, their performance characteristics would become similar to those of a multihulls with similar problems of manoeuvrability.

As Brad Butterworth states: "A multihull is just an extension of your modern keelboat, because you sail a modern keel at high angles downwind. Like Numbers we sailed on - all the tacks are on the bow and there is no pole aft - those days are long gone. I think that is what people have got to realise. Times have changed. Spinnakers poles are in the museum."

And simply making the step to multihulls isn’t as far as one can see into the crystal ball for the next step will be monohulls or multihulls that foil. Already Alinghi have been trialing lifting foils on their rudders. "If you want to, you can sail with a lot of lift on the leeward hull. That will be the way to go eventually. It applies to small boats and it will eventually come to the big boats. But it is a lot of work to gain the control," says Jones. "Eventually the boats will be flying. It is not that hard and it is not that far away."

So while the present generation of multihulls are unquestionably approaching the state of the art given the resources and time the teams have had to put into them in this cycle, how they might look given another 10 years of development is staggering.

In the shorter term the fundamental problem is that the match racing rules and all the techniques used work best in moderate to heavy displacement monohulls, but moderate to heavy displacement monohulls don’t represent the state of the art in yacht design at present.

We suspect that the viability of multihulls being used in future America’s Cups will depend very much on how the competition pans out in February. If it is genuinely a spectacle more awesome than we have ever seen before and there is any sense of it genuinely being a race, then the multihull is in with a chance. If not, then it is back to the dark ages.

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