Back to kindergarten - part 2

Today James Spithill and Ed Baird look at how an AC match in multihulls will be different to a monohull race

This article follows on from part 1 published yesterday....

Tactically sailing multihulls is very different too – shifts are all but irrelevant since the apparent wind is so prevalent, dragging the wind forward of the beam, and so it becomes all about finding pressure. “It is amazing what a knot or two of more wind speed will give you for an angle downwind,” confirms Alinghi helmsman Ed Baird. “The boats just take off which means you can turn deeper and go faster.”

BMW Oracle Racing's James Spithill agrees: “It is all about pressure, especially downwind. It kind of reminds me of skiff sailing in some ways. Even the Melges stuff, the shift is important, but downwind pressure rules and with these boats especially you really have to think so far ahead about what you are doing and once a decision is made you are committed.”

Then there is the manoeuvrability. Multihulls don’t carry their way and so are much slower through tacks and gybes, both manoeuvres very easy to get wrong, although on multihulls crews tend to develop their own techniques for managing this, be it backing headsails or sheeting on without the barber hauler as the boat gets up to speed. This varies from boat to boat largely dependent upon its displacement and turning ability. Ironically Cup monohulls have required similar techniques from their trimmers who help turn the boat in conjunction with the helmsman, but a subtlety that enables a smaller rudder to be fitted, thereby reducing drag and improving straight line speed, whereas do this to prevent themselves ending up in irons, sailing backwards.



This lack of manoeuvrability will have a profound effect on how a match race in multihulls will look compared to what we are used to between Cup monohulls. The pre-start will be very different with each crews' ability to hound each other dramatically reduced.

“It is totally different,” confirms Spithill as to how the match race text book is going to have to be re-written for the new boats. “It is going to take a lot of work to nut out the pre-start, the moves, etc. Because of the acceleration and the tacks, it really is tough. On the starting software side it is going to be quite challenging just with the huge acceleration, which is just massive compared to the Cup boats, where you have a few knots here or there. On these boats the speed differential can be so big. It is just really one of those things, that we’re not even really scratching the surface. Some of the basic principles are the same but it makes it real challenge, but it is fun too. It opens your mind up to different moves in terms of trying to achieve what you want in the start.”

Baird agrees: “Certainly it will be different. That is one of the questions - how much emphasis you put on the activity that the boats will have against each other in the minutes before you start. Do you develop a boat that is very good for that period of time? If you do you risk a trade-off with making it a little slower in a straight line and vica-versa - if you make a boat that is too fast in a straight line, the difficulty will come when it is time to turn. So those are all part of the exciting choices that have to be made at this stage in the preparation for the event.”

This of course assumes that the cunning design teams at Alinghi or BMW Oracle don’t come up with a way to make their boats more manoeuvrable. Imagine for example pumping in a lot of water on board during the pre-start to increase the displacement of the boat thereby increasing its momentum, water that could be subsequently expelled when straight line speed is required.



One can imagine that perhaps penalties in the pre-start may be easier to impose with less maneouvrable boats, but being first across the start line won’t be nearly as important.

As Ed Baird points out: “When one boat gets four or five or even 10 boat lengths ahead of the other we are all accustomed to that being an insurmountable lead and now it is just a few seconds. All you have to do is miss one puff or have the furler of the genniker have a mis-step and the other boat is past you. So it is a different game in that way but in the end it is sailing like we know sailing - it just happens faster.”

Having come fresh from match racing Banque Populaire on Groupama 2, Spithill shares how that has been happening: “When you come from the monohull Cup stuff, you get so used to boat to boat, bow to stern racing. You can do the whole race and either you are right behind him or he’s right behind you. And that can be the race. In these, it doesn’t seem to happen like that. You get together at the start and then you shoot off and it is usually like one boat gets a long way ahead or you get into huge splits, but you don’t get the super close racing I think just because the acceleration is so big. One boat is gone or they get into a puff first and they are out of there. If there were 20 of things launching around then of course you’d have close racing like any multihull fleet. One on one in multihulls, that is the one difference you notice. You don’t get the boat on boat stuff.”

While both skippers speak about having to think much further ahead than they typically would in monohulls, manoeuvrability issues will also affect the way the boats interact going up and down the race course. “You have to change your perspective to being a lot further away from everything, when you are planning ahead,” says Baird. “Whether you are crossing or not crossing somebody, you have to make a decision many many lengths away from each other because otherwise it is too late. You don’t make a 40° course alteration at the last moment on a fast multihull to duck someone or to go around them downwind. You just don’t do that at the last moment. And you can lose so much in a tack or a gybe. If you get it wrong it is not like you can just tack back again.”

So we can perhaps expect more corner banging – although this often happens in Cup monohull racing too but on this occasion will be boats the part of the course where there appears to be more pressure rather than shift. And it will all happen much faster (no bad thing), but the price of increased speed and adrenalin pumping straight line sailing will be a lack of close boat on boat competition.

Also don’t expect to see too many tacking duels, as the speed of the boats means that they rarely come into that close contact. In fact given that there is less benefit to tacking on shifts expect less maneouvres generally. “The fact is that they can be cumbersome to tack and gybe,” continues Baird. “It takes a bit longer and in that time period the distance travelled, if you weren’t doing the manoeuvre, can be substantial. So you have to weigh that. Also small changes in wind direction are not as big a factor on these boats as they are on a slower boats, because they make up a smaller percentage of what is happening on the race course. So you tend to pick a side and go there fast and come across the next time.”



Downwind the game will also be very very different. While downwind in Cup monohulls is typically a process with the chasing boat is very very occasionally able to roll past their opponent, in multihulls look forward to very much more significant lead changes. Once again contact between the boats will be less as they sail higher angles downwind hunting pressure, for a knot more wind can translate to 4 knots of boat speed, changing the game within seconds.

But at the end of the day Baird points out that it is still a match race and you still have to take into account what your opponent is doing. “In our races in Valencia we have been doing a few tacks and gybes as we go up and down to make sure we are having a match race against the other boat. If one boat turns and makes a tack, you don’t want to just leave them unless you are awfully confident of where you are going. In a fleet race you tend to see more people coming in from the edges because a group is fighting each other as they go to one side and another group is fighting each other when they go off to the other side and then they come back from the corners. But in a match race you still want to stay in the same area with your guys.”

So perhaps, particularly if the 90ft monsters turn out to be reasonably competitive speed-wise, there might be more contact than people assume?

New technologies

Aside from the sailing side, another aspect of the change to multihulls the Cup team and their designers are having to embrace is some entirely new technologies such as retracting foils and in particular wingmasts that not only rotating, but can also be canted up to weather as well as fore and aft. If the new boats are to be competitive there is no way they can ignore this equipment.

This has provided some eye-openers. “It is interesting to find some of the things that the top multihull guys don’t think are important to be worried about and some things they do think are very important,” says Baird. “Some of our biggest surprises have been finding areas that we expected would be of great concern to them and they weren’t so worried about that and other things we didn’t think about which were important. So we are trying to integrate the teams together to learn from each other and to go out and figure out what we have to get better at.”

Typically for example multihulls have wingmasts that won’t bend like a conventional spar, to the extent that they don’t even have runners or checkstays, which are used with great effect for trim on Cup monos. There is also nothing like the same amount of forestay tension, something which will certainly horrify the headsail trimmers.

“In some ways it is more simplified, maybe just because you are not doing as many manoeuvres - furlers and stuff like that help,” says Spithill of what he has observed about the technical side of the multis. “From the grinding side it all depends upon the course length - it is just non-stop and really a sort of endurance grind, rather than the short explosive grinds that we are used to on the Cup boat. So that was a bit of a surprise. Coming from the Cup it is difficult grinding but everyone was pretty impressed with how much grinding it takes to do a manoeuvre well, but also I think part of that is because Groupama 2 is set up for the long offshore races and if you were going to set this boat up for round the buoys racing, then you’d change a lot of the layout.”

So are they enjoying it? “It is awesome - really good fun,” says Spithill. “The boats are cool. The way they are set up with the foils and the speeds you get up to...I tell you, it is so much fun.”

Baird is more reserved: “It would be nice to look back on it in a couple of years and say that was really great. Right now, it is a big job in front of us and we are trying to take every minute to learn something new. It is definitely different and I think the guys are enjoying it because it is a great opportunity to learn a bunch of new things about the sport and ourselves and the equipment. We are pushing up into an area of boats and equipment that are unexplored and we are going to go out and find out how we did at predicting what was going to work. It is disappointing that we can’t have an event with lots of teams the way we were hoping to do it. But this is where we are and we will do our best to prepare for this.”

However another downside to racing these boats is that it can go wrong in a very terminal way, as Alinghi have already found recently to their cost. Baird tells us about the Foncia capsize: “It was in pretty good breeze, we were up in the 20s and there was a good swell running from the ocean and we were near shore which was where the waves started to stack up and with a bit of out-going current and we didn’t do our jobs right.

“We were turning down and just stuffed it in the water as you do with these things some times. It was very unfortunate. The timing was just too bad. We had already done that a couple of times that day with no trouble and this time it didn’t work. That shows you the level of power and danger that there can be on bigger boats like this and how quickly it can all go wrong. So that is part of what we are trying to learn so that we can avoid problems like that in the future. We certainly don’t want something like that to happen with the big boat because it will be catastrophic.

“The size of the things they are talking about for the next Cup, they are so big you are talking about pretty large amounts of danger for doing a manoeuvre like that. So that’s what we are working out - how to avoid those problems. Unfortunately sometime you have to make those mistake to work out is how to avoid those problems, to understand how not to make them later.”



Spithill says that to date they have had no close calls, but admits this is probably down to having been under the watchful eye of Franck Cammas as they have been out training. “I think the reason for that is just the Groupama guys. We wouldn’t have had such an accelerating learning curve without those guys. They have spent years sailing these sort of boats and experience like that, that rules on these sorts of boats. They have been through all of that. They have flipped them, so it is pretty nice to go through step by step with them. And we have had a big range of conditions – we had big waves the first day we sailed and quite a lot of wind, light air, so it has been good to see the boat and how it behaves.” Contrary to rumour it was Chris Draper’s new Extreme 40 that broke during training in Valencia and not BMW Oracle’s boat.

However Foncia’s capsize will not be the last carnage we will see from either of the teams prior to the 33rd America’s Cup and with their new boats we hope they will both come prepared enough with spare rigs and large boat building teams on stand-by should anything go awry.

Baird says that this is nothing new in the America’s Cup – it is the nature of the beast, being at the leading edge of technology. “Remember the early day of the IACC class, how many catastrophic failures there were with keels falling off, rudders and rigs breaking and boats breaking in half? The things that got out through the grave vine. And that has only been in the last 15 or so years. It is not like it is a perfect science at this level and you do have to go out and back yourself and believe in what you are doing, but after you do it once or twice you can do it better the next time. The reality is that we are pushing into an area where no one has been before adn we are just trying to step there cautiously and make sure we get there in a safe manner and yet we realise you can’t be too safe because you won’t win.”

At present Alinghi are signed up to compete in the iShares Cup, the first event being on Lake Lugano on the Italian-Swiss border at the end of May. “We realise the racing there is going to be quite a bit different to what the Cup might end up being both in terms of distance and numbers of boats on the course,” says Baird. “We think that when you can go racing you will learn faster than if you go out on your own and try to figure out all those thing.”

BMW Oracle Racing haven’t confirmed their participation yet and perhaps are looking to keep their powder dry.

As to how a 33rd America’s Cup in 90ft long multihulls will rate as a sailing event it will certainly be very very different. On the plus side it will be in the fastest most extreme state of the art race boats ever conceived - watching these individually will be a marvel. The boats will inevitably be further apart on the race course, but if the boats do turn out to be vaguely similar in pace - which is possible, they will certainly be closer than the two boats in 1988 - then there may be more match racing than we imagine. Pre-starts will probably be duller with less aggressive manoeuvring. From a spectator point of view it will be equally as exciting, but for different reasons.

Bear in mind too that courses will be very different to what we became used to in Valencia for the 32nd America's Cup - where it was twice around a windward-leeward or 12.6 miles total. For the 33rd event it will be on the longer Deed of Gift courses - 2x windward-leewards of 40 miles and one 39 mile race around an equilateral triangle, but bearing in mind the boats could be sailing at least twice as fast (expect them to be doing more than 20 knots upwind for example) the duration of the races given any sort of breeze could be less than they were in Valencia.

Frankly we can’t wait to see the new boats and how they will stack up against one another. The only shame is that under the Deed of Gift they will only sail three races with a one day gap between each. What will happen to them afterwards?