35th Americas Cup: Foiling Multihulls!

Final 2017 AC Skippers Press Conference:

 

All in all it is a great history: the rich battling the rich under a concept where the defender writes the rules.

Should one consider that speed is everything then there would be only one class in the Olympic games. Note that even F1 cars have restrictions on cubic capacity and foil area e.t.c. They were getting too powerful fast and dangerous.

This event has proved one thing IMO : that AC is a hard sell to the international man in the street. Its about rich kids toys and sailing purests and they need to get back to that so the super yachts come back in. New Zealand can still compete on this basis as it has backing with faith in our designers, engineers and sailors

Displacement mono hulls still require cutting edge technology and sailing ability. All the challenges still remain. Who cares is a cat goes romping past.

The bottom line is that we in NZ don't care what the rich American cooperates may want. We want to see tight extended racing between as many nations as possible. The conservative attitudes of the British and European countries could lend weight to a return to monohulls

One thing that MUST change back is that no way should the defender be allowed to compete in the Louis Vuitton Cup. That stunk IMO. The excitement of not knowing just how good the defender was, was an important part of the atmosphere

Cheers

M

 

There are numerous references in the range of books covering the history of yachting in Europe to the earliest match races.We would be referring to the days when the owner and his cronies strolled the decks while letting the professional sailing crew do all the work.After the race any wagers would be settled.It would have been expected that the crew would be competent or they would soon be dismissed and replaced.Something that was usual in the America's Cup too prior to WW2,although by then talented amateurs had begun to take the helm.Now we have reverted to professional crews and as demonstrated in San Francisco,the less able can be dumped quite rapidly.Out of curiosity,try to remember the names of any of the helmsmen of the pre J-class era.

As for the early rounds of the cup being for sea-going boats,its a little hard to visualise something like Reliance sailing across the Atlantic,even though the challengers had to.The requirement for boats to reach the venue on their own bottom was less of a challenge when the defender only had to sail from Boston,New York or Bristol.In some sports such a situation is called home advantage.

 

My vote goes for the 8.5m class

 

That's what the Americas cup used to be - a National Competition. So many Aussies in the two winning teams ... .

I would much prefer a far cheaper Class of any sort to reverse the elitist element.

 

The America's Cup has been the epitome of elitism for more than 160 years, why should it change now? At least they are catering for fans now with TV coverage and inshore courses that can be viewed from spectator areas - it could be argued that the squillionaires are catering for us plebs more than ever.

 

This is about as close as they've ever made sailing to a spectator sport - I think it works well, but it still depends heavily on the audience having enough knowledge to understand what they're seeing, and they aren't likely to have much of that unless they've actually sailed. One problem with these foilers in that it's harder for people to understand the difference between sailing upwind and downwind, but it certainly provides the spectacle that the pinnacle of sailing needs. TNZ was too far ahead of the rest with their design this time round for a close contest, but that won't happen every time, and there will be less room for people to make such game-changing advances in future. To grow the audience though, it will never be enough just to put more sailing on screens - what's needed is to get more people into boats, because that's where the audience comes from. It will never be strongly driven by what people see on TV (unless it's presented in a totally different way, such as building it into a soap opera).

 

Hank Schaff. Charlie Barr. John Brown. Sycamore. Phil Elsworth.

That's off the top of my head in a few seconds.

Shamrock IV wasn't too dissimilar to Reliance, but yes you're right the later L x SA boats became extreme. That's why Herreshoff designed the Universal Rule and created more seaworthy and less radical boats which could sail and actually race across the Atlantic. Schuyler was quite explicit that the donors of the Cup felt that it should be sailed in seagoing craft, something which fans of everything after the 12 Metres seem to be keen on forgetting.

 

Arguably the AC wasn't elitist in some ways. For decades on end the AC boats used the same rating system as the smaller boats that raced each weekend around the coasts, and the smaller boats were more advanced in design. The AC was merely a larger and slightly more conservative version of the same sort of boat, so people cold easily understand them. And in the UK huge numbers of people watched the AC boats during their racing as part of the Big Class in weekend regattas, or raced the same course at the same time in boats designed to the same rules. The actual AC races in the 1800s were a huge live spectator event.

Arguably the AC wasn't particularly elitist during the 12 Metre era. You can step off a typical medium/large offshore racer's foredeck onto a 12 Metre, do a class race, and feel quite at home instantly. When I was a kid there were two 12s regularly racing in my home town each weekend, and while that was unusual they fitted into normal inshore and offshore racing quite neatly.

It's interesting to read how people used to be concerned that the 12s were too elitist, despite the fact that they were the smallest AC boats ever. It shows how concerned sailors used to be about excessive elitism. Around that era the sport was bigger than it ever was before, arguably because even the AC people were trying to make it cheaper and more accessible. Now the AC is more elitist than ever, and many people are happy about it, the sport is in trouble.

 

Well said

 

What might happen if the boats have to get to the venue on their own bottom ?

 

Depends on the boat:

 

I think what would happen is that New Zealand would retain the cup forever.

 

The "own bottom" clause was simply the best way at the time to ensure that the boats were seaworthy, which was part of the donors' intent when they created the Cup as a contest of design and sailing. These days we can achieve the same result by having scantling requirements like the Js and the 12s did.