Jane Phare talks to the magnificent makers behind the flying machines - the New Zealand boatbuilders behind the America's Cup finalists.
Oracle: 'Put your money on NZ'
Larry's "toy shop" is not what you'd expect from an American billionaire.
The mystery Warkworth boat-building factory that created most of Oracle - the bows have to be built in the country of origin - most of Japan's boat and parts of other America's Cup fleet is, well, a little on the shabby side.
Turn past Mahurangi College into the Woodcocks Rd and Larry Ellison's neighbours are exactly what you'd expect for an industrial estate - paint and panel shops, a commercial laundry and Porky's lunch bar.
No 73 looks only a little more swish. There's a sign, Core Builders Composite, three bare flag poles, and a sweeping driveway. Although Oracle owns the whole property, there's not a bit of branding in sight.
Two "strictly no admittance" signs stuck in the grass outside the main building are the only hint that something exciting might be going on.
What looks like a home-built porch canopy sticks out over the entrance - a couple of bits of wood and a rough, unfinished top.
It turns out the sweeping driveway, the "strictly no admittance" signs and the flagpoles are relics from the property's days as a paper store and printing press for the Rodney Times.
Inside, I'm expecting a corporate-style welcome, a smart PR-type person brandishing an iPhone and a press pack, getting me to sign in. The photographer and I do sign in, but it's in an old-fashioned visitors' book.
A receptionist goes off to find Core Builders' manager Tim Smyth, and Susan Lake, the company's super-smart composite structural engineer, to show us round. Their clothes are warm and casual, the sort of gear you'd expect to get dirty or dusty in a factory.
Smyth is a good-natured, likeable man who's sailed in several Admiral's Cups, is fiercely committed to New Zealand boat building and technology and doesn't seem at all defensive about Oracle's performance so far. In fact he's alarmingly candid.
What can Jimmy Spithill do to turn things around before the next race?
Practise his starts, Smyth suggests with a grin.
In the next breath he gives credit to the Kiwis' innovation and pretty much says he thinks they'll win the America's Cup.
"You'd have to put your money behind Team New Zealand at the moment with the boat speed they've shown, which seems to be coming from their foil and wing package.
"Those are the areas that are able to be modified and adjusted but it takes 12 weeks to build a pair of those foils from scratch if you haven't had the design, so that's not going to happen.
"The odds would have to be New Zealand right now... but never say never."
Smyth credits the "genius" behind the Team NZ boat as the "very clever Frenchman" Guillaueme Verdier who has won the commission to design and engineer the new Volvo round-the-world yachts.
In the meantime he thinks Oracle will be trying to work on improving the wing, and Spithill's starts.
"You've got a young vigorous team in New Zealand, a bunch of young guys who I think have choreographed the handling of that boat beautifully and they work really efficiently together."
Smyth is nothing if not entertaining. Those young guns running round the boat was something you never used to see, he says.
"You had an old fat guy like (Brad) Butterworth on the back who couldn't move to save himself. Now you'd never see a guy like (Dennis) Conner or Butterworth on these boats because it's a young man's sport."
And it's that young man's sport, or at least making the boats they sail, that Smyth and Lake are passionate about. It is in this very ordinary, no-frills factory that 45 per cent of the America's Cup fleet was built.
As well as Oracle and Softbank Team Japan, parts of the Artemis and Groupama Team France boats were built at Core Builders, and even some parts for Team New Zealand.
Oracle also "lent" TNZ its "tools" - the moulds for the AC50s - for a price.
Right now, Core Builders is in sleep mode. There's a bit of work going on in the factory but most of the staff are taking holidays after, Lake says, Christmas was cancelled for two years in a row because they were so busy.
And yes, some of those staff are in Bermuda - though not quite the rescue team Spithill led us to believe.
Smyth, who describes Spithill as a "lovely chap," says the brash Aussie " loves to say that sort of stuff to wind you up".
The real story is that Core Builders hired an Airbnb house in Bermuda and told staff they were welcome to make their own way there. Three or four, including apprentices, are helping out at the Oracle base. The rest are on holiday.
Smyth tells how a former Core Builders' employee staying at the house rushed to help Team New Zealand when they capsized, working overnight to get it back on the water.
That's the thing, Smyth says. Kiwi boatbuilders don't really give a toss about which side they work for.
"I've got heaps of people here who've worked for Team New Zealand."
Adds Lake: "And we've lost heaps of people along the way to Southern Spars (Team New Zealand's boatbuilders)."
Lake is an American who arrived in New Zealand 16 years ago to work for an engineering company, completed a masters degree in engineering and never went home. She joined Core Building in 2011, a year after the company set up in New Zealand.
Smyth began working for Ellison in 2001, first in California before Oracle moved to northwest Washington in 2005 to be near aerospace technology. It was Smyth who helped build a business case to move to New Zealand, on the understanding the company would look for other work in between America's Cups.
"It wasn't easy. There was a lot of opposition to this move within our team. But Larry is an internationalist. He doesn't see it like that."
Not that Larry seems too interested in Core Builders. He's never visited, not once.
"I don't think he even knows we exist," Smyth jokes. "We're so successful Larry doesn't have to worry about us. We return him a profit. He know he gets cheap product. We're much more cost-effective than Team New Zealand 's manufacturers."
Lake says Ellison's accountants certainly know they exist. "We get audited and we do stocktakes so they know where every penny, as any billionaire would, is spent."
Smyth gets annoyed when the media "bangs on" about how much money Ellison is throwing at the America's Cup.
The whole reason for moving to New Zealand and buying the old printing building, ideal because of its 6m-high stud, was to save money, he says.
Surprisingly, he says Ellison is "not fully engaged" in the America's Cup. "It's a hobby for him. He's very active in his business still."
As well as building boats that fly, Smyth and Lake are equally proud of the other work Core Builders takes on, an eclectic range of carbon fibre technology that has nothing to do with sailing.
They've made a mould for a set of foils for American big-wave surfer Laird Hamilton's surfboard, worked on tidal turbine blades and made a $100,000 mould for a huge, outdoor spiral staircase in a new house in Remuera.
Lake worked on the interpretative centre at the Marsden Cross Historic Reserve in Northland, its undulating, paper-thin roof the creation of Core Builders. And the company built last year's floating "Future Islands" for the New Zealand exhibition at the Venice Architecture Biennale.
Smyth is keen for that developmental work to continue. He's nervous that if Team New Zealand wins it will invoke the ruling that requires America's Cup boats to be built in the country they are representing.
That would mean Core Builders' core business would evaporate overnight, another blow to boatbuilding. It would also make it harder, or impossible, for some countries to compete.
If the existing format is kept, he says, all the teams who competed in the America's Cup this year would be in, and an additional three European teams "that I know of but am not allowed to say" would come.
The makers of Team New Zealand's flying machine are already starting to dream of the next challenge. Of course, they'd need to get Peter Burling and Blair Tuke to agree.
Just think of it, Southern Spars marketing manager Ben Gladwell enthuses. First gold at the Olympics, then winning the America's Cup, and finally the Volvo Ocean Race. "That would be very cool."
Gladwell's talking about Burling and Tuke's gold medal win at Rio last year, having the Cup well within their grasp and the fact the Volvo round-the-world race starts in October, plenty of time to jump aboard.
"They're in a pretty good position to win all three before the age of 30," Gladwell points out. "Most people spend their entire lives trying to do that. Nobody's ever done it."
But first things first. We haven't won the Cup ... yet.
We're sitting in the smart boardroom of Southern Spars, owned by giant UK finance company Oakley Capital, in Avondale.
I battled with signing in on a digital machine and somehow missed a couple of vowels out of my place of work. So now my sticker badge says I work for NZ Hrld. That wouldn't have happened in the visitor book days.
It's flash this place, huge, modern and stylish, and immaculately clean. A massive 10,000sq m of purpose built factory space, making masts for some of the largest superyachts in the world.
And now there's this boat, this super-fast hydrofoiling wonder steered by Burling while his crew pedal.
Gladwell wanders off to make me a cup of tea while Southern's general manager Peter Batcheler talks about what gives Team New Zealand's boat the edge. Well, he would, wouldn't he? Southern Spars built it from scratch, hulls included - a first for them.
Though the Avondale building, with its impressive glass and steel-facade, and a polished-concrete factory floor that is within 1mm of being perfectly flat, is new on the block, the relationship with Team NZ goes way back to the Sir Peter Blake era.
Southern Spars made the masts for Blake's Steinlager 11 for the 1989/1990 Whitbread and the rigs for his America's Cup boat in San Diego in 1995.
Gladwell says he would have been at kindy in those days. Batcheler's memory goes back a bit further. The factory, or rather a big old shed, was in the Viaduct's Pakenham St, back when the area was a collection of city markets, rusty fishing boats and boatbuilding yards.
"Put it this way, they used to wear hard hats to stop bits of roof falling on them," Batcheler says.
But that old shed had to go when boatbuilding changed from carving a shape out of wood to high-tech composite construction, the layering of carbon fibre.
Suddenly, quality control was the key. Air quality, temperature and humidity became essential; jigsaws were all but retired.
Suddenly Southern Spars had to figure out how to build a wing or, as Batcheler puts it, an upended Airbus 330 with a wing stuck on it. But it had to be about a third of the weight and it had to be able to flap.
That was back in 2012.
"This was whole new scary stuff because we're now not making masts, which is what've done all our lives and still do," says Batcheler.
"It becomes a factory process, not a workshop process. That's the difference between a kid making a bonnet for his RX3 Mazda out of carbon fibre and making something that is genuinely four times the strength of metal and half the weight. And that's the business we're in."
When the Southern Spars team watched their baby pitch pole and capsize in Bermuda's Great Sound, Batcheler wasn't too worried. He knew the damage was cosmetic and could be fixed.
"The boat didn't worry me. The wing worried me more. "
A broken wing would be a different story. One break you could patch together. "But if you break into too many bits you run out of bits to chamfer. Two breaks, that gets awkward."
And there's no way a new wing could be made in time if both TNZ's wings were damaged.
Says Gladwell: "You're talking 7500 man-hours. That's a lot of people for a long time."
He, like everyone at Southern Spars, is pretty confident Team New Zealand will do well.
If they win tomorrow's races then they've won the Cup, he says.
Apart from the foiling set-up the Kiwi boat has a weight advantage, thanks to carbon-fibre technology developed by composite spar maker Brendan Jones and his team.
They used the same technology to develop lightweight racing wheels for Velodrome bikes. They know exactly how much lighter the Kiwi boat is, but they don't want it in print.
"Just say 'lots'," Batcheler says.
Gladwell says the weight difference was such that the other America's Cup teams tried to get the weight window raised to force Team New Zealand to make its boat heavier. Grant Dalton refused, "bless him," he says.
Added to that weight advantage is the TNZ crew, who are lighter overall. They don't need big, brawny torsos to give them grinding power. The overall weight advantage means they can foil more quickly in light winds. There's not a lot, they say, that Jimmy can do.
Gladwell: "Jimmy Spithill says everything is still on the table but I think the table is a lot smaller this time because there's much less than you can do.
"If I was Oracle I'd be going sailing. I wouldn't be pissing round in the shed. I'd be trying to find different ways of using the gear they already have."
In fact Gladwell wonders what Oracle has been doing for the past four years.
"To be quite honest I 'd be a bit embarrassed if I was Oracle. I would expect to be absolutely smacking us because of the way that the tables were weighted in their favour.
"They spent four years sailing boats very similar to the AC50s and told everybody else you can't launch your boat until this year. Four months before the Cup and they've had four years."
Oracle spent "two weeks in the shed" making adjustments and then were beaten by Team New Zealand in four races.
"Where else do you look? They should have turned up on day one of the America's Cup with a boat that was 110 per cent. If anyone is going to make gains, it is probably Team NZ."
Batcheler and Goodwell think TNZ have other advantages. They can tack faster than Oracle, their sailing ability is better and their foils are performing better.
Batcheler: "It's a hell of a lot wetter up front on the Oracle boat. That creates drag."
Sailors are a superstitious lot so most won't be drawn on what-next-for-the-cup-if-we-win discussions, for fear of jinxing the race. The people at Southern Spars are no different although they do let slip they've had discussions with Dalton who's said what he thinks the next boats should be.
"We think that's a pretty good idea, " says Batcheler, "but we're not going anywhere beyond that."
So will Team NZ stay with multihulls, or as Oracle fears, go back to traditional monohulls?
Gladwell chooses his words carefully. "If Team New Zealand won, that would prove they have a jump on their competitors in multihulls so you would assume they stay where they have an advantage. But at the end of the day it will be the sailing team and design team's decision."