RACING BULL
Undoubtedly the best we’ve seen Alinghi Red Bull Racing sail in Barcelona, today was a full-on, three-hour session conducted at race pace for the hard-charging Swiss who demonstrated some superb technique, dynamic flight control and pin-point precise helming.
With a high cloud cover leaving a leaden, autumnal sky, thankfully today saw much flatter water with the two metre swells of earlier this week abating, leaving a near-perfect racetrack for the Swiss to thoroughly exploit and push their techniques to the limit. Winds were consistent and building from six to eleven knots, and in those conditions an AC75 is literally on rails with ample wriggle-room margin for trial and error on pitch, cant and trim.
What seemed obvious is the pre-sets that Alinghi Red Bull Racing have built into ‘BoatZero’ after over a year of hard grind. Downwind they were running a deep camber in the mainsail that maintained power especially through the gybes whilst upwind the trim team could elect to go board-flat and work the traveller hard or drop power in via the cunningham. Over a racecourse, their sail trim looked massively on-point all afternoon and this was complemented by the bullseye steering of Arnaud Psarofaghis and Maxime Bachelin whose helming partnership is quite definitely moving to the next level in terms of co-ordination, transitions and communication. Impressive to watch.
Once the Chase Boat team had dropped in marks, it was mesmerising to see the control that the team had on BoatZero, even with its asymmetric foil set up with American Magic legacy anhedral foils on port and legacy Emirates Team New Zealand T-sections on starboard. Today it was hard to differentiate any ride-height trim anomalies with the Flight Controllers comfortable to run equally low on either tack upwind whilst downwind, the concentration was on rudder immersion and keeping the bow level to up. From some of the recon video shots bow on, BoatZero looked an impressively powerful, and stable ride today whilst the double-board round-ups at the leeward gates were some of the most accurate we’ve seen from any team in this America’s Cup cycle. There were smiles dockside – and they were well deserved.
Speaking afterwards, Yves Detrey, a sailing legend, double America’s Cup winner and Flight Controller of the highest order summed up the day saying: “It was a very good day for us, it was quite intense, just little stops, and it was good to get back into racing mode…We were expecting the breeze to come up but that's why we went out with the J3 and we kept it all day and you know we learned how to sail with a smaller sail in the lighter breeze and vice versa, so I think it was a good exercise.”
Welcoming the calmer seas off Barcelona today, Yves added: “I can tell you it’s way more pleasant to sail in the conditions like today, you know it was a much flatter and it was nice to see flat sea states because obviously when it's rough it's a bit more difficult but yeah I think it was the forecast we were expecting today and it was nice to pick up some of the exercises that we wanted to do in the in these conditions because we’ve had some rough sea states lately.”
Summarising the significant boat-handling and technique improvements that the Swiss are building in steadily to their programme, Yves added: “We are pretty confident that we’re getting better at it, still a lot to work on for sure in different conditions but we're learning every day, we are improving our communication and timings every day and we're going to keep doing that.”
Alinghi Red Bull Racing were the only team training today out in Barcelona as the focus shifts to the second Preliminary Regatta in Jeddah at the end of November. The Swiss have sent both of their AC40s down to Saudi Arabia and will be doing warm-water two boat training in near-perfect conditions before the regatta starts.
On-Water Recon Unit Report - Alinghi Red Bull Racing: The Swiss practised pre-starts and sailed around the marks on a race course during a three hour session on the water. The team rolled out their AC75 at 9.00am. The yacht was craned in, and the usual pre-sailing checks were carried out, with engineers onboard testing and checking the hydraulics.
The team docked out at 11.00am, hoisting the M2-2 mainsail and the J3-3 headsail inside the port and being towed out by 11.28am for ten minutes heading to the North. The wind conditions outside were 4 to 5 knots from 230º and a calmer sea state compared to most of the past week, also some clouds all over the city and hazy on the horizon.
They waited for fifteen minutes for a bit more breeze and right after, they did a warm-up upwind-downwind rounding one mark placed 2NM away from El Forum. At 12.31pm, they commenced the first pre-start procedure using a mark as a pin and one of the chase boats as a Committee Boat. They simulated a racecourse, consisting of two legs of 4 nautical miles.
The sailors stopped for a break at 1.00pm, and with 7 to 9 knots from 230º they continued with another pre-start procedure twenty minutes later. They seemed to be sailing more confident with today's sea state after the rough sea state conditions of the past two weeks.
They did plenty of deep angle manoeuvres in a very short range of time. After crossing the finish line, they stopped for another break. Twenty minutes later, at 2pm, they followed with the last pre-start procedure of the day having 10 knots average from 240º. They ended up the session by the port entrance after a long upwind consisting on 10 manoeuvres, all of them fully foiling. At 2.30pm, the team dropped the sails and towed the yacht back to the base, where they docked in by 2.55pm.
The team covered a total of 46 nautical miles over three hours on the water, 90min were spend sailing with 78 manoeuvres performed, 94% fully foiling.