America's Cup

Golden 100's

I agree entirely. If there ever was a place to try go fast mono technologies, this class of use once throw away boats has got to be it.

For one thing, they don't venture far from shore. For another, there are usually plenty of spectators and spectator boats around to fish hapless victims of boat design experiments gone awry.

Much unlike trans ocean races such as that Volvo thing.

I wonder if there ever has been a single race fatality in the entire history of the AC.

As for rule ideas:

why not come up with an absolute sail area limit, say 300 sm, where every square inch of sail is counted, and alow the hull length to be anything the dear designer chooses as long as the DL is at least 100.

With the stipulation that the 'L' in the DL be LWL + LOD/2.

And, just for funzies, also stipulate that the draft can be no greater than the Beam or some absolute multiple of it.

All of these proposals are easy to calculate and can have designers tearing their hair out for years because every design decision will be a bet on the wind conditions on the day of the actual races.

In my veiw, such chance could not only make upsets more likely, but make them all but inevitable.

Bob

PS We can give this class a new name: Golden 100's.

 

I can see what you are doing sharpii - you just want to give Bruce Farr a restless night or 365.

Formula rules are fine and can end up with cool boats if the rule is conceived well.

For example the square metre classes - sexy glorious boats. Your rule sorta points toward something similar but with much less overhang!

Anyway ... I would rather keep Mr Farr awake thinking about just pure speed and control issues rather than sapping his creativity by having yet another rule for the poor guy to have to wrap his head around.

If he can design the fastest boat that is just as deep as it is wide ... who cares? And I don't mean that nastily - but it is something that is hard to care about.

But if all the design heavies are spending their budgets on improvements to speed and control ... I wanna know everything!!!

Keep everything open and have a fixed length overall to restrict expense.

Not only would we see some exciting boats, we would start to see real breakthroughs that affect all boats rather than ones that just find a better solution within some rule framework.

The real world is much more fun than hanging around in someone else's abstraction.

Best Regards
Michael Storer

 

Hold on just a moment.

All rules end up creating a type of boat.

The basic rules of manual power and no shifting ballast have spawned the fastest sailing vessels on the planet.

It is obvious therefore that the only reason more restrictive rules exist is because someone does not like the boats that an open rule creates. The only limits on these boats are natural ones.

If you want to go kind of fast but not real fast, you write a rule that does not allow windsurfers, and sail multihulls.

If you are pissed off that you didn't think of adding a hull or two and your ego is greater than your desire to go fast, you write a rule that does not allow more than one hull.

After you have limited your choice to the slowest vessel, you drop acid and decide that now you want to go fast. You get the rules changed to allow moving ballast and power assist and hire RGYD and as long as you keep yourself medicated you think you are sailing fast.

Those that are not on your medication can still see that monohulls and fast are very hard to fit into the same sentence (except for windsurfers).

Now we look at IACC boats. 85 foot boats that are not very fast, even in the context of the slowest of boat types. Somehow the notion that the AC is a race seeps through the meds and we conclude that going faster is what is needed if we are racing. We don't want to go real fast, we wouldn't want to see a windsurfer win the AC. We've been on our meds so long that we cannot even think about more than one hull without having a fit, so we decide to make a new rule to generate faster AC boats?

Why would anyone want faster match race boats? Anyone that has ever done any match racing knows that much faster boats could have been built when they wrote the IACC rule. Thank goodness they tried to write a rule that generated good match racers rather than a development rule that created fast boats.

They only requirement in match racing is that you beat one other boat. If speed is the only consideration, it ends up being a drag race ... yawn ...
Ability to manoeuvre, acceleration out of tacks and gybes, reaching hull speed in the least amount of breeze are things that make for a good match racing boat.

The selection process for a new generation of IACC match racers should be to find a rule that allows close tactical racing over the widest range of wind speeds. I'll wager that an IACC boat would cream a VO70 or stupor-maxi on an AC course in any breeze below 20 knots.

I'm all for creating exciting boats. Exciting both to sail and to watch. I just don't see the AC and match racing as the place for those designs.

 

I quite agree.

 

It seems that the direction of this thread points to the idea that the ACC is becomming less and less relevant. Maybe future AC races should be done with Open 60's which are probably the fastest monos around that have at least a reasonable amount of safety.

Or maybe 'Volvo 70's' could be used to keep that 'crash and burn' effect going.

And national teams need to be reinstated with very strict residentcy rules such as the requirement of full citizenship of the crews from the country they are sailing for.

This way you would end up with real boats, not throw away sailing apperatuses and the races could bolster national pride as well.

Bob

PS- My earlier rule proposal shows that I missed my medication that morning.
I should have said make the draft a proportion of the Length rather than that of the Beam. Now that would really force some tough design trade offs. A longer boat would be heavier for its sail area, but would be potentially faster and more weatherly than a short boat which would be lighter and shallower.

 

You cannot race the America's Cup with boats designed for ocean racing.

 

Agree.

The challenge is to somehow make AC racing interesting to television viewers, keep the race coverage about the same length as a football or hockey game, and still get the best match racers in the world to compete in the event.

I'm not sure that it is reasonable to expect non-racers, much less non-sailors to understand match racing. It is totally foreign to any other form of racing that I know of.

A format of fleet races that dropped the slowest half of the fleet into a silver division and ended up as a best 2 of 3 match race for the two fastest boats might be interesting.

 

Ac

New IACC race boat:
billochcut.jpg
http://www.sailinganarchy.com/fringe/2005/images/billochcut.jpg
Uses sliding on-deck ballast.....

 

Why not?

Didn't the original America have to cross the ocean?

And wouldn't a type that had a wider range of speeds make for more exciting races?

Bob

 

Yes, America sailed across the Atlantic and won the 100 Guinea Cup. It was a fleet race.

Once it became America's Cup, it has been a match race event.

And no, a wider range of speed would make for very dull match racing.

 

The Americas Cup has never just been about match racing.

It is just as much about excellence in design and INNOVATION. Some of the best racing has been when the boats were not well matched - there is the sense of a real breakthrough,

eg the first series of Intrepid. Australia 2.

I am starting to think that racing to a formula rule is just daft. All formula rules are an attempt to reflect the physics (always grossly simplified), but in the end they are type forming because they can never take full account of the physics.

As soon as you formulate a rule you end up with plank on edge cutters, or overlapping genoas, or IOR bumps, or super low stability; where effort is put towards making the boat as slow as possible as far as the rule sees the boat but a little bit faster as far as the real world goes.

Restricted classes make a lot more sense - where there is an upper or a lower limit on some sensible measurements - some or all of length, beam, sail area, mast height etc
A class cats
18ft skiffs
Moths

All of them are going somewhere - the fewer restrictions there are - the more interesting the development.

Who could at all be interested in America's Cup by comparison?

The design should be opened up by getting rid of a too restrictive a rule.

If the design is opened up to allow a wider range of possibilities there will be the occasional breakthrough boat - and it will be a lousy matchrace.

GREAT! That's one for design innovation.

But between breakthroughs there will be a stable period of design when the best matchracer will win - as we have seen from the classes above.

GREAT! That's one for match racing.

We see this cycle of stable period and breakthrough in all the above classes - there are long periods of close racing until the next breakthrough.

This is much more in line with the history of the cup. After all the America was a technological breakthrough when taken to British waters - The race around the Isle of Wight was not even close "Your Majesty, there is no second"

And that is exactly my point - the cup has not just been about matchracing. Design Excellence has been just as important - but it should be kept relevant to the real world by getting rid of formula type class rules or by having too tight an envelope in the case of a restricted class.

Over to you.

Best Wishes
Michael

 

Design / Innovation

Well said, Michael!

 

Jeez, guys, when has the Americas Cup *ever* been about fastest possible boats, leading edge etc etc. Maybe for a few years in the 1920s and that's about it. What's its about is the highest status and most expensive boat race in the world, and it doesn't matter too much what the boats are like provided they're big and expensive.

 

You need to quantify "breakthrough." Australia II won 4 of 7 races in 1983. 12's can average about 8 knots around the 24 mile AC course of the day (includes reaching legs). The race should take about 3 hours or 180 minutes. The largest winning margin was about 3 minutes, less than 2%.

I agree that Intrepid and Australia II were breakthrough boats. At the AC level of sailing a .5% increase in average speed is a breakthrough.

Dead on. That is why handicap racing is forever flawed. It is not possible for a rating or handicap system to fairly rate dissimilar boats, they cannot even fairly rate boats of different sizes.

And each ends up creating similar boats. Just as the IACC rule has.

What speed differential makes for interesting racing? 1%? 10.1 knots rather than 10? Do we really want to watch a two boat race when one is 10 boat lengths ahead after an hour? Lets go high-tech and use VO70's ... 1% might be 30.3 knots vs 30.0 knots ... now the 1% faster boat is 30 lengths ahead after an hour. Is that what we want?

A quest for design excellence is just what we have. Designers of hulls, rigs, and sails looking to find a 1% breakthrough. If they find only 0.5% the boat will pull a horizon job on the others. In a typical 3 hour race, that 0.5% gain from finding the right fillet radius is 15 boat lengths.

The big plus of racing 10 knot boats rather than 20 - 30 knot boats is that a 1% difference in speed is a smaller distance. When the distance is close, good match racing can make up for a 1% speed advantage.

The only knock on the IACC rule (and any other development rule) is that early in the life of the rule, improvements are easy to come by. As these rules age the inovations get smaller and more time passes between each one. Our modern super-computing power has increased the speed of both early inovation and early stagnation.

The Universal (Metre) Rule governed the AC from 1920 to 1987 ... 67 years and 14 matches, 4 in 24 Metre J-Class boats and 10 in 12 Metre boats. At the end of the 12 Metre era, finding even 0.25% increases in speed was hard.

The IACC rule has only seen 4 Cup races. The USA won 1, NZ won 2, and the Swiss won 1.

Prior to the IACC rule the score was: USA 26, Australia 1

It is hard to argue against the IACC rule. Except that the boats are too big and too expensive (just like the J-Class boats in the 1920's and 30's).

I'd like to see 15-20 teams competing for the AC, not just 5-10. That might take a return to smaller boats, similar in size to the 12's. The IACC rule does not scale at all well, you cannot just plug 12 Metres in instead of 24 Metres and have a smaller version of the class. Something in the 60 foot range rather than the 90 foot range would cut expenses in half and should double the number of entries. At one time there were 21 12 Metre entries for the 1991 AC.

The AC should be sailed under a rule that insures that the boats are closely enough matched in performance that a superior sailor can overcome a speed disadvantage (as Dennis came so close to doing in 1983).

 

the reason the boats are bigger is because it is a bigger area to post the sponsors logo on. And, the big boats are always the ones who get the attention internationally, so i dont see the America's Cup going to a 60 foot boat anytime soon when most of the people involved are happy with the 85 footers they have now.