America's Cup: Too big and too expensive... but we'll still miss them

The AC72s are complicated and costly, but they have produced exciting racing. Photo / Brett Phibbs

Today could be the day we farewell the AC72 catamarans. They will be missed.

The one thing everyone agrees on is that they will not be in the next America's Cup regatta. Even though Oracle Team USA and Team New Zealand have produced a memorable Cup match, the boats have been deemed too complicated and costly, requiring too many people even to launch and maintain them.

But sailors from both camps have spoken admiringly enough of the AC72s for the big cats to have staked at least a reasonable claim for a stay of execution for the 35th America's Cup.

Most of the sailors acknowledge that the economics of the boats and those who operate and maintain them are not good and not conducive to a multiple-challenger event, even though they love sailing them.

Emirates Team NZ tactician Ray Davies says: "The boats are great. They are a hell of a lot of fun, there's no other way to put it. Everyone out there is really enjoying it; when we have taken guests out they have been absolutely blown away by the experience and the boats are very, very cool."

His counterpart on Oracle, Sir Ben Ainslie, has called this the most exciting sailing of his career and says: "I think that is a good description - chess on rocket ships. When you are out there, it is trying to judge things at pretty high speed. Like the race the other day where we were up to 32 knots at times [it was actually 34 knots] upwind. Lee-bow tacks at 32 knots is something none of us have really had to deal with before.

"All the guys here would agree that we have enjoyed this racing immensely. It's been a huge challenge to learn to sail these boats. The racing in the finals has been unbelievable.

"So it really comes down to whether we want to carry on with the development of this type of class or whether we want to go back to monohulls or high-performance monohulls.

"What are we going to do to bring the cost down, to have more teams competing next time round? That doesn't necessarily mean a smaller boat is going to be more cost-effective, it comes down a lot to the people, that's one of the biggest things regarding the budget."

You'll notice the lack of a suggested solution there. If Team NZ win the Cup, they will have the unenviable task of sorting out what to do with a boat that brings excitement but also chilling costs and lack of participation.

Yet to ditch it and go back to monohulls is like leaving the Ferrari in the garage and taking the Morris 1000 to work; turning your back on excitement is also a hard way to win friends and influence people when it comes to attracting audiences to America's Cup sailing.

Some of the problem is that the part of the regatta that was a dreary procession has been forgotten, excised by the close racing between these two camps. But it must be said that, even without Oracle's two-point penalty from the cheating saga, the score was still 8-3, enough to be called one-sided though closer than most expected.

Said Team NZ's Dean Barker: "Unbelievably, in the first generation of a class, you've got two boats that are close together in terms of performance."

Perhaps left unsaid was the fact that there were "only" two boats. There were four in total at this regatta, two of them off the pace.

But, as Oracle skipper Jimmy Spithill said yesterday, give these boats another generation and the sailors more time to sail themand they would be breaking 50knots.