GEAR CHANGING MASTERCLASS
Underlining their status as arguably the stand-out Challenger for the 37th America’s Cup, Luna Rossa Prada Pirelli today completed a masterclass of a double-session and sent out a very clear signal to the rest of the teams, that they mean business. Jimmy Spithill was back onboard with his Kangaroo-decaled helmet in the starboard pod and whenever Jimmy’s in town, the boat looks to have an added dimension. Tacks were slick, gybes were crisp and the bear-aways around the windward marks in the afternoon sea-breeze were rapid and flat. This is demonstration sailing Italian-style and so confident are the team now in their LEQ12 that mistakes are rare, mishaps fewer. The Italian juggernaut looks unstoppable.
The morning session saw a blistering opening run of some 74 minutes of non-stop foiling whilst just before lunch the team put in another stint at 48 minutes of flight. Remarkable. Over the course of the day, the Italians put in a total of 71 tacks and gybes with an 86% success rate in foil-to-foil or touch & go tacks and an impressive 88% for the gybes. The sailors rotated through the day bringing in Marco Gradoni and Ruggero Tita for some helm time to relieve Jimmy and Francesco Bruni with zero loss in form. Luna Rossa Prada Pirelli simply had the pedal to the floor all day long.
Speaking afterwards, Jimmy Spithill was his usual open self and clearly very settled with the team, saying: “We got a great session in the morning with the Mistral, then we came back, had lunch European style, little siesta and then we got out there in the afternoon for the sea-breeze direction…It was a pretty unstable funny day, but it just worked out beautifully on that course area where we got our own little private sea-breeze for a couple hours.”
The Italians were mindful of the thunderstorms bubbling all around the hills that tower over Cagliari and the Bay as the last vestiges of what’s been a chilly and unpredictable winter in the northern hemisphere, pass through to hopefully reveal springtime. Temperatures were up at 14 degrees Celsius and when asked about the specific goals and objectives for the day, Jimmy offered: “A bit of everything…I mean it's just every day you go out there’s a change, an upgrade and also we did a lot of rotation, we had a lot of the sailors rotating through the boat so it was good to get some hours, we did a little bit of straight line stuff and then we did some racing around the marks.”
A jib change at lunchtime ahead of the sea breeze was a great call by the team and as Jimmy says: “The hardest thing on days like this is really to pick the jib and a lot of the time you just have to go with what you see but then it can change quickly and that happened a couple of times today but besides that I thought it was pretty impressive day to go out and get a double session like that, so it was a great call.”
And it’s these types of calls that are now happening intuitively that make Luna Rossa Prada Pirelli such a potent force in this America’s Cup cycle. Talking about how the day will be de-briefed by Philippe Presti and the coaching staff, Jimmy said : “Today was really about changing gears given how unstable the weather was, you know with those thunderstorms all around us, and so it was easier to be caught with the jib under range or over range so I think for the sailors we will be focusing on that, just the best way to change gears and we also have some performance stuff which will wait until tomorrow to give the guys the night to go through and post-process it. So yeah, we got a lot of good stuff from today.”
Looking at the Luna Rossa Prada Pirelli team around him and then at the formidable teams working in this Cup cycle, Jimmy gave an accurate summation, saying: “I think we’ve got a great squad here, we've got a really good mix of people, we’ve got a lot youth and some great talent, experience; the design team are a very experienced group, really good culture inside the team, so look we’re really happy with the people we’ve got but we're definitely not discounting any of the other teams because there’s a lot of smart people involved there and at the end of the day you control your own destiny so you do watch other teams but yeah we’re just focussing on our sailing and our testing at the moment.”
Smart team. Smart sailing. Luna Rossa Prada Pirelli are coming in fast. (Magnus Wheatley)
On Water Recon Unit Notes: The LRPP team rolled out their LEQ12 at 6:30am, stepped the mast and craned it in following the usual protocol for on board checks. Dock-out was scheduled at 8:20am to catch the light Maestrale NW offshore breeze with flat waters in the Gulf.
Before docking out, expecting medium to light breeze, the bigger mainsail M1 was locked in the mast fittings followed by the usual inflation of the air chamber between upper battens. The team headed towards Sella del Diavolo to fully hoist the main with the jib J1.5-1.
As the sailing action started, wind conditions looked pretty light with 8-10kn NW. After a few foiling manoeuvres, straight-line sailing for testing seemed to prevail until the RIB placed some marks to be rounded. Having completed respectively three upwind and downwind legs recording almost 1,5h of uninterrupted foiling, a 30min break followed with shore crew diving below deck with a bucket and toolboxes perhaps for an electronic issue or simply an empty battery to be switched.
As meanwhile the breeze had dropped to marginal foiling conditions of 7-8 knots TWS, the LEQ12 was towed up and focussed on the execution of light wind manoeuvres tuning their technique. Even when slightly touching down, the LEQ12 was able to gain speed again and attain foiling mode on several occasions.
At 11:00am the breeze dropped below 6 knots and the team decided to head back to the molo Ichnusa for lunch break remaining in stand-by for a possible second dock out to catch the incoming sea breeze.
Dock-out was scheduled for 1:30pm as the first sights 7-8 knots of SE sea breeze were spotted. The main M1 was hoisted with the J1 jib and the LEQ12 foiled for approx. 30 minutes until the breeze shifted to the south increasing to 10-12kn with choppier sea state.
The J2 was hoisted for some additional mark roundings, completing several legs before finally hoisting back the J1. The approximate take-off speed of 16-18kn in TWA 80 and TWS9-11kn has been newly matched by Recon RIB’s GPS. Throughout the day, several crew swapping were observed for helmsmen and flight controllers.
Certainly a productive day for the team with lots of sailing in a variety of environmental conditions. On the day an approximate foiling time of 225 minutes was recorded along with approximately 71 manoeuvres out of which 37 tacks and 34 gybes in addition to some mark rounding manoeuvres.
Dock out: 0820 Dock-in: 1615
Onboard Today
Helms: Francesco Bruni / Ruggero Tita / Marco Gradoni / Ruggero Tita
Crew: Andrea Tesei / Umberto Molineris / Vittorio Bissaro
Sails Used:
Mainsail (MN1-1S): 5 hour 25 minutes
J1 (J1.5-1-A): 4 hours 35 minutes
J2 (J2-1-B): 30 minutes
Total Tacks: 37 - 26 foil-to-foil, 6 touch & go, 5 touchdowns.
Total Gybes: 34 – 23 foil-to-foil, 7 touch & go, 4 touchdowns.
Recon Notes: Foiling runs AM: 74, 8, 16, 48, PM: 29, 19,8,7,16
Wind Strength: 8:40 NW 7-9kn/ 10:50 NW 6-8kn / 13:40 SE 7-8kn/ 14:30 S 10-12kn. AM:11℃, sunny. PM: 14°c, cloudy.