Secrets of their success

By Suzanne McFadden

It was an ominous sign - and it came six months before anyone tried to tackle Team New Zealand for the Auld Mug.

The defenders launched their first new black boat, NZL57, last September and spent only one week sailing it against the boat that won the America's Cup in 1995, NZL32.

That was all the time the New Zealanders needed to ascertain that the new generation of black boats was fast.

The observing challengers were nervous - as it turned out, rightly so.

Nevertheless, the Kiwis maintain they were not convinced they had an edge until February 19 - race one of the America's Cup 5-0 blackwash over Prada.

Team New Zealand's designers did, however, get the sneaky feeling they had got it right four days earlier when they saw the whole of Luna Rossa's hull - and spotted a weakness.

But it was not just NZL60's revolutionary keel bulb that propelled it to the first successful defence of the America's Cup outside the United States.

The real secrets of Team New Zealand's success were the magicians who conjured up the winning formula. The people who for years have been testing, refining, training and finally match-racing that slick, stealth-bomber of a black boat.

It began with the hulls. The day NZL57 came out of the boatyard for the first time, skipper Russell Coutts leaned over and whispered: "The next one will be faster."

And so it was that the sister boat, NZL60, was the one chosen to defend the Cup.

But Team New Zealand believe either yacht would have won - they were the two fastest boats in town.

At after-race conferences, with Prada sitting alongside, Team New Zealand were gracious in victory, repeatedly saying the rival boats were probably equal in speed.

Baloney. They knew theirs was faster.

The two black hulls were not unlike each other - NZL60 was born from its elder sister.

The drawings of NZL57, based on the ideas of veteran designer Laurie Davidson, had been sitting around for a year before the design team decided to give it a go in the tank at the Wolfston Unit in England.

They had made six trips there, every May and October from 1996, testing quarter-scale models of hulls to see how they moved through the water, how they pitched and yawed.

The design got the thumbs up and, with a few tweaks, NZL57 was created. The design of the next hull, for NZL60, was never tank-tested.

Unlike in 1995, both boats were similar in speed. Some testing days, NZL57 was faster. Change the appendages - put a different bulb on NZL60 - and you would have a new winner.

But towards the end of testing and racing, it became obvious that the second boat had the edge.

The hulls were slick, but the victory owed much to other innovations. Among those we saw were:

\EE The Millennium rig, which created a lot less windage.

\EE The "funny bow."

\EE Wings in the middle of the keel bulb.

\EE The code zero headsail for acceleration in the pre-start.

\EE Removing the top mast backstays upwind to cut drag.

Every little innovation worked in with the others.

The winglets made the boat faster upwind. Water spirals off the back of the keel, making extra drag - the wings stop the corkscrew effect.

All the other boats had their wings at the back of the bulb. The theory behind moving them to the middle was that it stopped the spiralling earlier.

The Millennium rig was the brainchild of designer Mike Drummond. The mast was stiffer, which helped control the mainsail shape pounding through waves. A whole set of spreaders was dispensed with, and the criss-cross rigging meant less windage and weight.

Coutts dreamed up the code zero headsail after seeing similar big sails used in the round-the-world race. It is a large, light, almost translucent sail used in flukey winds to help the boat accelerate.

The Kiwis had been testing it secretly for more than two years, until the challengers spotted it a few months before the Cup.

Prada tried one but never used it.

Both black boats had bows never seen on America's Cup competitors. NZL60's knuckle bow made it effectively longer than it appears to the measuring rule - and longer means faster.

In 1995, there was no time for tricks. NZL32 was put in the water briefly before being shipped to San Diego; NZL38 was shipped straight there without testing in the water.

The main difference between rivals then was the flexible wings on the black boats' bulbs. But the secret then - as it was this time - was an all-over better boat.

Before either of the new-generation black boats was launched, Coutts said they would be "significantly different" from any of the challenger yachts he had seen.

That, of course, could have been good or bad.

Luna Rossa was a narrow boat compared with NZL60. Team New Zealand tank-tested narrow boats, but they felt comfortable with what they had chosen.

That was until they saw that virtually all the challengers had gone for narrow boats. Suddenly they had the widest beam in the fleet, except for Stars & Stripes.

Then the opposition tried to instil doubt in the black camp. One of Prada's head designers, Doug Peterson, started taking swipes at the 2000 generation black boats from the day he saw them out of the water.

Peterson had helped design the Black Magic boats for 1995, but was not invited back for a second campaign. His quote that his former employers would look "real dumb, real soon" came back to haunt him.

By the time they saw his Prada hull out of the water in its entirety, at the second keel-reveal day in the week before the Cup match began, the Kiwis spotted a weakness in the shape of ITA45 and started to feel more sure.

Peterson had designed a fast boat in ITA45 - it was a classic Cup yacht. But even on that first day, confounding Peterson's prediction of difficulties for the black boat in winds under 12 knots, Team New Zealand beat Prada.

The telling blows were Coutts out-foxing Luna Rossa skipper Francesco de Angelis in the pre-start - as he would for the next three races - and how the more experienced Kiwi crew read and played the windshifts better than the Italians.

The key to Team New Zealand's success was pure and simple: people.

People who strove to make the boat faster every day it went out on the water. No one was ever content with the speed reached - it could always be quicker.

As defenders, Team New Zealand's only disadvantage, supposedly, was that they would not have any racing before the match - after choosing to go it alone without defence trials.

Like all true Kiwi athletes, they wanted to be seen as the underdogs.

As it turned out, Coutts and his frontline crew - almost all of them survivors from 1995 - got the best preparation from training inside their own camp, against a team of young guns led by Dean Barker.

And Barker, in getting to drive the boat home in the fifth and deciding race of the Cup, set himself up for a future at the helm of the 2003 defence.

It was a move that made Coutts a legend worldwide. Introducing new crew through the five races was not only a master-stroke for next time, but the act of sportsmanship no doubt earned him points with future sponsors - now that he has assumed the role of Sir Peter Blake, with the help of Brad Butterworth and Tom Schnackenberg.

Team New Zealand's five race wins in Auckland - and for that matter, the previous five in San Diego - were far from thrillers. They were clinical - one Italian journalist even describing the black boat crew as robotic.

But if Team New Zealand had not beaten Prada so precisely, there would have been questions asked.

They had the advantage at every turn: five years to prepare, with all their funding in place virtually from the start. On top of that, they spent four summers on the Hauraki Gulf.

But we never saw how fast NZL60 was - and probably never will.

Let's face it, the boat was never pushed. Team New Zealand won every start; led at every mark.

They still have a little bag of tricks they never had to pull out, like their heavy-air sails. No one saw how fast the Kiwi boat was in breezes over 25 knots - where it was expected to fly.

And we will probably never see all of those tricks. They will be superseded by other black boats, sails, rigs and keels.

After the high of victory and the elation of public acclaim, the lightbulbs of inspiration are set to start flashing on a new generation of boats when, on Monday, the team go back to work.