I went racing with Alinghi today aboard one of their Extreme 40 catamarans in Valencia. Ed Baird was steering on my boat (and before you ask, no, he didn’t capsize), with Rodney Ardern, Lorenzo Mazza and Pieter van Nieuwenhuizen doing the hard work up front.
On the black boat, Murray Jones was steering with Brad Butterworth on mainsheet. Ed and crew blitzed the starts and won today’s informal series 5-0.
This was all part of a media day run by Alinghi, branded ‘Back to Sailing’. Although the dark cloud of legal uncertainty continues to hang over the 33rd America’s Cup, the sailing and design teams at Alinghi are full bore into learning and researching the weird and wonderful possibilities of a multi race in boats measuring 90ft by 90ft.
Now, I had thought those dimensions were maximum limits, but apparently not, according to Alinghi’s legal counsel Lucien Masmejean. 90ft by 90ft is what it says on BMW Oracle Racing’s challenge certificate, so you couldn’t build something smaller even if you wanted to!
The sailors and designers are genuinely excited by the challenge ahead of them. The predicted loads are mind boggling, quite terrifying in fact. Upwind speeds are likely to be in the region of 20 knots, downwind they could exceed 40 knots. The dynamic duo in the offshore multi world, Nigel Irens and Benoit Cabaret, have been wheeled in to make sure Grant Simmer, Rolf Vrolijk, Dirk Kramers and all the established monohull experts at Alinghi don’t get completely carried away. Irens and Cabaret are the monumentally successful double act behind Ellen MacArthur’s B&Q Castorama, and more recently Francis Joyon’s IDEC 2 and Thomas Coville’s Sodeb’O. Note that all these boats are trimarans, by the way.
Although Alinghi - and BMW Oracle for that matter - remain tight lipped as to whether their beast will float on two hulls or three, most seem to be expecting a trimaran of some form.
With both teams now so far down the multihull road, I’ve finally managed to get excited about the prospect of a showdown in giant multis. Building of the American boat is said to be well advanced, the Swiss are just about to start building theirs, but even then there are no certainties that these boats will actually contest the 33rd Cup. Crazy times, but for now the Cup is still a legal dogfight and it is not inconceivable that these giant multis could be consigned to the America’s Cup dustbin before they have even been sailed.
That would be a terrible shame, but on the other hand, it was a terrible shame to return to Valencia today, nine months after the epic conclusion of the 32nd Cup, and see the tumbleweed blowing through all those empty challenger bases around a much quieter Port America’s Cup than I remember from last summer.
QUESTION: What would you rather see? The duel to go ahead in giant multihulls, or to scrap them and return to a more traditional Cup in keelboats, with a challenger series?
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