Saving it all til last

Luna Rossa skipper Max Sirena brings us up to speed with the Italian AC challenge

With three challenges under its belt dating back to 2000, Luna Rossa has made some good decisions with their latest campaign for the 34th America’s Cup. Perhaps their smart move was in trying to jump start their campaign, to make up for their late entry, by entering into a deal to buy Emirates Team New Zealand’s technology, effectively ending up with what is at present a near sistership to the Kiwi’s first AC72.

The Italian team’s AC72 was launched in Auckland at the end of October after her hulls were built in Italy (as required by the AC Deed of Gift/AC34 Protocol). Much of the rest of the fantastic-looking red/mirror finished catamaran was constructed in New Zealand where Luna Rossa has its training base over the northern hemisphere winter.

Last week, Luna Rossa completed the Auckland phase of its campaign for the 34th America’s Cup. For the Italian team the America’s Cup World Series regatta in Naples, taking place in three week’s time, is all-important and they are using this opportunity as a punctuation mark in their campaign, to decamp from New Zealand, shipping all their gear across the Pacific, readey to set up shop again in San Francisco.

The team’s ultimate base at the venue for the 34th America Cup, by the Bay Bridge at Pier 32, won’t be ready until June, so in the interim Luna Rossa will be establishing itself temporarily at the opposite end of the Bay Bridge in Alameda (near Artemis Racing). The aim is to be sailing again by 8-10 May, however before this the team is also taking the opportunity to carry out major work on their AC72 with modifications being made both before she departs Auckland and when she arrives in the USA. As Luna Rossa skipper Max Sirena states of what will be sailing on San Francisco Bay in a month and a half’s time: “You will see a different looking boat for sure.”

The hulls of the Luna Rossa, while built in Italy, are “very similar” to the Kiwi’s team first boat, Sirena continues. “There are some differences in the deck layout compared to them and obviously all the rest is different - the aero package will be different and the boards will be different, the wing will be slightly different. The big difference will come out in mid-June.”

Most significant about Luna Rossa compared to the competition is that they are a ‘one boat’ campaign. However with AC72s this is a slightly misleading concept. Given not only the AC72's high potential for breakage and/or disaster on the highly confined race course, combined with the profound impact any such incident can have on their campaign (unlike with the V5 boats, they have no stockpile of old spars/masts/hulls/keels etc in their back yard) it is likely that the teams will do as Emirates Team New Zealand has done and make all the parts between their first and second boats interchangeable. It is unlikely for example that any of the teams (okay the two remaining teams) will launch radically different second boats. So while Luna Rossa is a one boat campaign, in reality the only part they won’t be able to change is the platform – the hulls and crossbeams - which ironically, compared to AC boats of the past, is not the most important part of the design equation this time around in comparison to the wings and foils.

“We won’t have a spare hull, but obviously we will have a lot of spares for the platform and we have another wing coming pretty soon,” says Sirena. “We started this campaign knowing the risk of having only one boat.” Obviously if they destroy their boat as Oracle Team USA did last autumn, then it may well be game over for the Italian campaign and this means that they have had to be (and will have to be goig forwards) highly vigilant in preventing major catastrophe. However Sirena maintains there are plus sides to the one boat approach. While other two boat teams are bogged down in having a huge number of staff and the technical issues of developing and maintaining two boats, Luna Rossa’s primary focus is in their team becoming the most proficient in getting their AC72 around the race track without incident.

Saying this Luna Rossa does have its own significant in-house design team - 16 strong according to the team’s website - including many heavy hitters from long term Luna Rossa design team members such as naval architect Roberto Biscontini, British structural engineer Will Brook and CFD/VPP specialist Giorgio Provencali to ex-Alinghi CFD guru Michel Richelsen and sail designer Mike Schrieber. One gets the impression from Sirena that we have yet to see the most significant work from this group.

Ironically when the AC72 concept was first unveiled everyone assumed that the unfamiliar wing would be the most significant design issue, but while this is certainly important, Sirena confirms that today foils are more important, while equally vital to performing when competition commences this summer will be the crew’s ability to get their AC72 around the race course in good order.

Despite being the last team to get their AC72 out on the water, surprisingly Sirena observes that they have spent more days out training than any other team. They sailed 26 days in the period up until the end of January and 18 days subsequent to that, although he admits “some of them have been short due to weather or, to be honest, due to failure. But we are pretty happy.”

While to those of us watching from afar, the impression is of Emirates Team New Zealand and Luna Rossa lining up on a daily basis, Sirena says this has been far from the case. In fact he maintains that over the last five months they have only lined up formally to race on a couple of days. “In terms of real racing, we've done probably five and six pre-starts and three or four races.”

In these they attempted to replicate the short courses they will experience on San Francisco Bay in the Louis Vuitton Cup. “It is the only way to realise how tough and short the course will be,” explains Sirena. “These boats are going so fast that it takes no time even to sail three miles. I remember the first time we did a race in 20+ knots, I asked Checco [tactician Francisco Bruni] was the bottom mark one mile away or three miles, because we were going so fast downwind.”

Photos and video of the races between Luna Rossa and Emirates Team New Zealand (issued by the Kiwis) always shows the Kiwis in front and Sirena says he doesn’t have problem with that at this stage. “Obviously the Kiwis are ahead of us in terms of their aero and hydrodynamics package, new boards, a new boat, etc. For us we have a different plan from a performance point of due to having a one boat campaign so we have to spend as much time on the water to learn how to design better tools.”

Sirena has been part of the last three Luna Rossa America’s Cup campaigns and decamped to BMW Oracle Racing (as was) with Jimmy Spithill prior to the 33rd America’s Cup during which he had the less than easy task of being the US team’s ‘wingmast manager’. However he served his time on the bow of the Luna Rossa ACC monohulls and he says that training on the AC72 is a rather different experience. “The version 5 boat was more of a cruising boat compared to this kind of boat! Even when we were racing there were lots of moments when you basically had nothing to do and you could have a conversation with the guy next to you. With this boat it is always full on and you always have to be focussed, because everyone on board is important to the speed of the boat. It is full time work.”

While Sirena is the Luna Rossa team’s skipper, on board he handles the pit and it is British Olympic 49er silver medallist and Extreme Sailing Series winner Chris Draper who holds the reigns, having now been formally appointed helmsman with the talented Francesco Bruni (another ex-Olympic 49er sailor) as tactician. Last year the team announced that there would be a competition for the helmsman’s spot between Draper, Paul Campbell-James and yet another 49er sailor, Iker Martinez. Internally they made the decision to go with Draper around Christmas time.

“Obviously, at some stage of the campaign you have to make a final decision and we announced Chris to give some stability to the team,” says Sirena. “We were trialling Chris, Iker and CJ in that role and obviously that was good at the beginning of the campaign, because to be honest the only way for us to catch up with the other teams was to do a two boat campaign in the AC45s and to train with them to develop the sailing team. And Chris’s team did super well in the circuit and we hope we’ll close the season well in Naples. Personally I am really really happy with the choice they made.”

Another vital ingredient to their campaign has been their coach, none other than Volvo Ocean Race winner and French maxi-multihull guru Franck Cammas, who claimed the Jules Verne Trophy on the 103ft Groupama 3 trimaran early in 2010, and then, incredibly, sailed the same boat (admittedly with a shorter rig) to singlehanded victory in the Route du Rhum that same year.

“Franck was important because to be honest no one in the team, not even Iker, had experience in big multihulls,” says Sirena. “Especially at the beginning it was important to have one guy to give us confidence in sailing the boat. In the end, it only took a few days for Chris to understand how to drive the boat."

Obviously it is still a little too early to call the form going into the Louis Vuitton Cup, however Sirena reckons that come proceedings getting underway on 7 July “everyone will start form the same level. One of the key points is time in the water and that will give you the confidence with your boat and the race course which will make it more relaxed on board when you have to make decisions, manoeuvring in big breeze, etc. The more time we sail in San Francisco on this boat the better it will be for us, because if we can sign off on the basic stuff then we can focus more on different aspects during the races. I think in this Cup, the team that makes the least mistakes will have a good chance to get ahead.”

And, Sirena adds, also the team which suffers the least breakage.

“It is going to be very exciting. We are looking forward to July for sure.”

Tommorrow helmsman Chris Draper gives his impression of sailling the Italian AC72