America's Cup at the World Yacht Racing Forum

Less mud-slinging; Coutts and Butterworth share the same hangover; many constructive points otherwise made

The much-anticipated conclusion to the World Yacht Racing Forum this year was the America’s Cup debate, including stars of the show - both Alinghi’s Brad Butterworth and BMW Oracle Racing’s Russell Coutts – accompanied by a panel including Paul Cayard, former Victory Challenge skipper Magnus Holmberg, ALL4ONE’s Stephane Kandler, TeamOrigin’s Marcus Hutchinson and representatives from the fledgling Greek and GreenComm (ex +39) teams.

The session kicked off with presentation by Russell Coutts and Brad Butterworth, who had been out on the lash the previous night and who still appeared to be severely suffering from it mid-afternoon the following day (good effort).

Coutts mentioned the wing. "One of the words we have heard a lot around the base is ‘Wow’ - it didn’t matter who was there, or whether they had an intimate knowledge of the intricacies of the design, it was the same reaction when they walked into the big tent and saw the wing taking shape.” The wing he says is bigger than any wing that has gone on to an aircraft, even Howard Hughes’ enormous Spruce Goose. "Plenty of times when I have wondered if this was such a good idea, but the wing has turned an amazing boats into an astonishing one.” He spoke about how the wing generates such huge power and showed a photo on their trimaran flying a hull in just 2-3 knots of wind.

"I didn’t realise how quickly you could change the shape of it and how instanteously,” continued Coutts. "When you complete a tack and try and get the hull flying, you can dump camber into the head of the wing and that shifts the CoE up much higher and as soon as you build speed, you want to drop the boat, so you can instantly dump the back element off up higher and twist the wing and reduce camber up high, so you can effectively wash off the power and shift the CoE back down.” With a soft sail, he says, you don’t have anything like that degree of control. On the main sheet they have around 3 tonnes of load, compared to 25 tonnes with the previous soft sail rig.

"Until now I guess boats like Reliance and Shamrock were the most extreme boats in the America’s Cup and they are the reference. In 100 year’s time I hope that people will look back at Alinghi and BMW and they may be landmark yachts in the AC’s long history.”

An equally croaky Brad Butterworth also outlined his team, stating that Alinghi were about 90 strong including 20 nationalities "sailing, design, shore crew, weather team, media, admin and a big legal team!”

He generally outlined the stats of Alinghi 5 - 60m high mast, the ball it sits on capable of being loaded like 15 SUVs, their 1100sqm genniker and 100,000 manhours having gone into the project to dat.

Butterworth confirmed that the two teams are in discussion at the moment over lengthening the duration of the 33rd America’s Cup up from a first to two competition. [The sticking point we heard outside of this session is not on the lengthening of it but of how this should happen – Alinghi want the W-L, triangle, W-L three race cycle to repeat, BMW Oracle want W-L and triangles to alternate].

Butterworth hoped that the appointment of an arbitration panel would prevent visits to the New York Supreme Court in the future. Significantly he added that "the loser [presumably referring to BMW Oracle Racing/GGYC] should be magnanimous and drop whatever lawsuits they have and let the new defender and challengers move forwards and organise another great event which is what this Cup deserves."

Butterworth later confirmed that Alinghi wouldn’t be returning to court should they lose the 33rd America’s Cup. Coutts was more circumspect – he welcomed the appointment of the 33rd AC jury. "We want to avoid the court battles. The jury is in place now and if we can use that jury to answer the open questions, that still need to be resolved, then there is no reasons why either of the teams should go back to court."

As to the 33rd America’s Cup taking place in February, Alinghi, it seems, are prepared to race be it in RAK or Valencia. BMW are preparing to race in Valencia, but RAK in February would be harder. Although they have stopped training in San Diego, packing the boat up seems to be taking an age (the wing is being disassembled for example) and they aren’t going to sailing in Valencia [assuming that is the venue] until mid-January.

"If there was a venue change at this stage, we’d have to look at when we could get to the new venue,” said Coutts. "We’d have to see how quickly we could set up there. We want to race the Cup as soon as we can. Our position hasn’t changed since the early days.”

As to their ideal venue for the 34th America’s Cup neither Coutts nor Butterworth would be drawn, although Coutts reiterated that if they won Larry Ellison had said that they would be in Valencia, provided they came up with similar commercial terms to the 32nd AC.

On the choice of boat for the 34th America’s Cup, Alinghi over recent weeks have been letting it be known that they would be keen for that event to be in multihulls too. Among the other AC people on stage this afternoon, only the representative from GreenComm showed wholehearted interest in this (remember they had wanted a challenger selection trial versus BMW Oracle Racing prior to the 33rd AC) and the Greek Challenge representative who said within his team they were 50-50 over monohull or multihull.

Magnus Holmberg reckoned that the 34th AC should be in V5 boats and held as soon as humanly possible (2012 before the Olympics or 2013 seemed to be the consensus). Paul Cayard was also generally in agreement with this. Stephane Kandler voted for monohulls too.



Russell Coutts didn’t rule out multihulls, but instead suggested consensus. "I think it is possible that you could have a good match race if the two multihulls were well matched. I don’t think that idea should be discarded, but you have to consider all the other aspects.” He added: "If the teams don’t or can’t support the concept I believe it is doomed for failure from the outset. The long term goal is to have 15 viable teams.”

Coutts wisely warned that even with a fast monohull, there might be similar problems encountered to a multihull match race, simply due to speed issues. He suggested that if a fast boat were chosen then there should be some limits placed on the course to force the boats back together.

Marcus Hutchinson was more sceptical of multihulls: "I think the world needs to be convinced a lot more that multihulls can offer something that is a spectacular match race. I would be more concerned about the sheer cost of developing more multihulls, but also specifically the practicalities of these boats that go so fast how big the courses are, how they will cover a 20 mile windward-leeward. If they split tack out of the start half way up the beat they are going to 10-15 miles apart, how exciting is that going to be to watch?”

There were some votes taken, although perhaps slightly oddly worded. "Is it important that there is close match racing in the AC?” Everyone thought so. "Will multihulls deliver close match racing?” No one thought so.

Magnus Holmberg was adamant that a structure needed to be put in place to prevent the present debacle from happening again. He put forward the interesting general principle that the Protocol for the next AC should be written before that event concluded, and the future defender decided, thus ensuring that the document was fairer to both challengers and defender. Coutts was in agreement with this, comparing it with the 1988 situation when independently of the two teams in the DoG match, the ACC rule was created.

Paul Cayard once again put forward the argument for independent management as he did last year and recently once again to thedailysail (read this here).

Coutts in his opening presentation had said that if they win then Larry Ellison would set up professional and independent management for the America’s Cup, although not offering them so much power that it just became ‘another Grand Prix event’.



Butterworth didn’t wholeheartedly disagree with this. "I am a big fan of planning for the future,” he stated wryly. "I think getting the stakeholders involved is the most important thing to do. Neutral management is difficult because the sport is complicated and there is a defender and a challenge, then the balance on the sports side [ie how long the defender gets to play with the challengers] has to be sorted out."

There was much discussion about the Acts (or whatever they are to be called next time). Coutts suggested that they would mean more if at some point in the cycle (ie not immediately, in order for teams to acclimatise) they counted towards the challenger selection series, presumably in a more serious way than they did for the 32nd AC. Cayard went one stage further suggesting that perhaps only the top four should go through to race a Louis Vuitton Trophy type regatta - as is the case in the NFL. Stephane Kandler made the point that last time for smaller teams it was too costly to compete in all the Acts.

From the auditorium Ian Williams, himself an ex-lawyer, queried whether both Alinghi and BMW Oracle would accept all the verdicts of the appointed international jury. To this Coutts seemed to answer on both his behalf and oddly on behalf of Brad. "The jury has been selected by ISAF and both teams support that. There will be other issues to resolve before the jury. One of them could be the interpretation of ‘constructed in country’ and issues like that so you don’t have a situation where one team is protesting the other on regatta day. Both teams know the rules going into it and know how they are going to be applied and therefore you avoid the situation where you end up back in court over it." He added that he didn’t think a regular court would overturn the decision of a panel of experts.

An interesting point was made about the acid test for the Challenger of Record - that they had to be a club genuinely wanting to win the America’s Cup themselves.

The sessions concluded with compere Richard Simmonds asking the pertinent question of whether both multihulls would make it around the 33rd AC race course. To this Brad Butterworth reckoned it would certainly be a challenge, whereas a more confident Coutts countered: "You have professional sailors on board and I think this is going to be a great race. It will end up being a match race for sure, you have to manoeuvres the boats against each other and that is why you have good sailors on board so that they can handle that position."

So this year’s AC session wasn’t the mud-slinging fest of last year, but clarified some points and there was more tequila-fuelled inter-Kiwi AC veteran love going on between Coutts and his old mate Butterworth than perhaps other members within each of their teams and certainly their lawyers might genuinely feel.