Designs on the Auld Mug

By Suzanne McFadden

An armada of slender, heavy boats with streamlined masts and huge sails are about to launch into their own Gulf war.

They are the new creations of designers who have spent as long as four years and tens of millions of dollars each drawing up the boats they believe will win the 30th America's Cup. But right now, not one of them knows if they have got it right.

In 1983, Australia's winged keel won the Cup. In 1992, the silver Cuban fibre sail and a narrow boat powered America3 to victory.

Last time, Team New Zealand came up with a superior all-round design to win the cup. There was nothing radically different about the Black Magics, but they were remarkably faster than any other boat on the water.

So what technological evolution will give one challenger the edge over 10 others this time?

One thing is known for sure — boats in Auckland will have to be stronger than they were for San Diego's lean breezes.

The new generation of cup boats which have arrived in Auckland are narrower and heavier. All of the boats are near the maximum weight of 25 tonnes.

That means under the International America's Cup Class rule, designers can compensate for the heaviness with a longer boat and more sail area.

The rule was introduced in 1988 — after the catamaran-big boat fiasco between Dennis Conner and Sir Michael Fay — to curb the building of gargantuan boats at absurd costs.

The narrowest boats appear to be the French Sixieme Sens and the first AmericaOne; the widest Stars & Stripes and one of the Nippon sisters. But they are all thinner than the '95 family of boats.

Team New Zealand's design head, Tom Schnackenberg, explains narrower generally equals faster.

"Narrowness decreases the boat's stability — they're tippier and they aren't as powerful. But there is less drag so they may be faster," he said.

Schnackenberg believes that dimensionally, the new cup boats will all be pretty much the same.

"The formulas will all be pretty similar. But that's where different shapes come into it. You can get quite clever about that."

Bows are the most visible difference to the hulls this time. The Spanish have a strange up-turned nose on their Bravo Espana.

Aloha Racing have taken a dollar each way. On one boat is a destroyer bow, which virtually goes straight down to the water and makes a boat longer at the waterline at lower speeds. On the other is a metre, or spoon, bow — with a long overhang which performs better in sea swells.

Team New Zealand's first new defence boat, NZL57, has a cross between the two.

It is unlikely that what is under the water will make that much of a difference this time. That's why many of the syndicates have chosen to leave their appendages uncovered for their neighbours to see.

The difference could be a long way above the ocean — in the rig.

With the extremes of wind conditions on the Hauraki Gulf, the mast and sails are likely to be the most important facet of design in Auckland.

The masts are more streamlined than in the past — longer in chord (the fore and aft dimensions) which fools the air into thinking that the mast is a lot more slender. Young America's has the longest chord. It is similar in appearance to masts used on multihulls except for one fundamental difference – multihull masts rotate. Under the Cup rule, masts must be fixed at the deck, but they will still twist.

Modern day sails are made from combinations of Kevlar, carbon and Mylar – a polyester film. Abracadabra2000 will sport blue sails, while Prada's are shimmering silver.

Most syndicates devote almost half of their budgets to design, testing and boat construction.

Designers, like the sailors, must comply with a three-year residency in the country the syndicate represents. Prada's Doug Peterson has been an American, a Kiwi and now an Italian in the last eight years.

Peterson is a man in demand — he helped design the '92 cup winner America3 and the '95 champion Black Magics. Prada, with their unrivalled budget, moved quickly to snap him up to create their Luna Rossas.

Experts in aerodynamics and fluid dynamics are employed to help draw up the fastest sails, hulls and appendages. Quarter-scale models are tested in tanks and wind tunnels, and thousands of hours are spent in front of computer screens putting virtual boats through every imaginable scenario on the water.

The designers of America 150 years ago did not have CFD (computational fluid dynamics) or VPP (velocity performance prediction) to help create their victorious boat.

Despite the cyber-age, some designers, like Team New Zealand's design leader Laurie Davidson, still revert to a good old fashioned pencil to draw the lines of their boats.

Then, of course, there is real boat testing. Most of the 11 challengers have used '92 or '95 vintage boats over the last two or three years to test their ideas.

Syndicates make alterations to the boats' bows, put in modified masts, hoist a myriad of different sails and try out new appendages before they design their new boats.

The Spanish Challenge so radically changed their '95 boat Rioja de Espana, they had to get a new sail number from the cup measurers. But it turned out she was far too slow to be a useful trialhorse for the new Bravo Espana, and they left her back in Valencia.

Prada bought the assets of America3; AmericaOne obtained OneAustralia's remaining boat; Young America kept Pact95's resources. America True bought Chris Dickson's old '95 boat Tag Heuer from the Young Americans, and the Swiss chartered the unfinished FRA40 from the now-folded Cannes syndicate.

All of these syndicates came to Auckland last summer to test their ideas in the exact place where they will race their new machines, the Hauraki Gulf.

Everyone has different ideas about how to create the ultimate cup boat. Now the test is who has got it right – and who can afford to prove their theories right.