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ORACLE TEAM USA

As proud official partner of ORACLE TEAM USA, defender of the prestigious America’s Cup trophy, we provide technical racing gear and shore gear for the ORACLE TEAM USA along with official merchandise available online for world wide distribution, onsite each America´s Cup World Series event and at the final in Bermuda – June 2017.

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As the official clothing partner to ORACLE TEAM USA, defender of the 35th America’s Cup, we have worked closely together with the sailors in developing the range of technical clothing. We have now produced a limited final production of the masterpiece in the official collection; THE ORACLE TEAM USA JACKET made in all way GORE-TEX ®  stretch. A unique replica of the jackets worn by the team.

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Syndicate relaunches trimaran

• Associated Press

SAN DIEGO -- From San Diego Bay to Lake Geneva, it's going to be a busy week for the bitter rivals set to sail for the America's Cup in February.

The challenger, BMW Oracle Racing of San Francisco, relaunched its massive trimaran on Monday after the carbon-fiber boat was significantly modified during the last four months.

The space age-looking craft, which is 90 feet long and wide, was moved by crane from a temporary boatshed to its berth on San Diego Bay. It will be refitted with its mast before being load-tested to make sure it's seaworthy. Sailing on the Pacific Ocean is scheduled to resume later this week.

"This is cutting-edge technology and sailing. We look forward to testing how fast is fast," helmsman James Spithill said in a statement.

BMW Oracle Racing is scheduled to face two-time defending America's Cup champion Alinghi of Switzerland in a best-of-three series starting Feb. 8 for the oldest trophy in international sports.

Whether this boat, known as BOR 90, is the boat that will face Alinghi remains to be seen. BMW Oracle Racing, owned by software tycoon and sailor Larry Ellison, has refused to confirm or deny reports it is building a second boat. Ellison is believed to have spent between $10 million and $20 million on the boat that was relaunched Monday.

If BMW Oracle Racing is building a new trimaran, the current one would at least serve as a sparring partner.

Early Wednesday morning, with the Alps as a backdrop, a giant helicopter is scheduled to lift Alinghi's equally exotic-looking catamaran from a boatyard in Villeneuve and launch it on Lake Geneva. The Swiss cat, which has been described as resembling a praying mantis, is 90 feet on the waterline and reportedly has a bowsprit that makes it 120 feet overall. It's believed to be not quite 90 feet wide.

The rare one-on-one showdown is the result of a convoluted two-year court fight in which the American syndicate's backing yacht club was declared the rightful Challenger of Record.

Alinghi gets to pick the venue. A decision is due by Aug. 8, six months before the first race. The Swiss are reportedly considering Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, apparently feeling their catamaran would excel there in light wind and flat water.

With the size and speed of the giant multihulls, it could be the most spectacular racing in the 158-year history of the America's Cup.

BMW Oracle Racing's trimaran is capable of sailing two to 2½ times the speed of the wind. Its mast is as high as a 16-story building and the mainsail is twice the size of a Boeing 747's wing. The boat's three hulls would cover the diamond on a major league baseball field and are just shorter than an NBA court.

Boats that size can be lethal, too. BMW Oracle Racing's sailors have been cautious while sailing their big boat, including wearing crash helmets and life vests, hardly the normal America's Cup attire.

BMW's sailors are en route to San Diego to resume testing the trimaran. The outer hulls, or floats, appear to have been significantly reshaped.

"We are really excited to get out on the water," Spithill said. "We still have plenty to do to complete sea trials and be ready for the America's Cup in February so every day counts. It is only seven months until the America's Cup so we are now in the home stretch."

The trimaran was launched late last summer in Anacortes, Wash., and underwent initial sea trials on Puget Sound. It was barged to San Diego and underwent two testing sessions on the Pacific Ocean.

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Bmw sail racing academy.

Written by John Summerton // Photography by Pedro Martinez

‘Prepare to tack,’ the skipper yells, and I check the mainsail whilst clinging to the boat and frantically trying to remember everything from our morning briefing. Sailing is completely new to me, so when I was invited to participate in a sail-racing academy as part of a British team with BMW I was both apprehensive and excited. However, I’ll never say no to a challenge or an opportunity to push myself. Now, after just a couple of hours on the water running through the basics of navigation, equipment and technique, we are racing against experienced European teams.

The BMW Sail Racing Academy forms a link between amateur sailing and some of the most prestigious yachting events in the Mediterranean. Born in 2005, the three-day intensive training course has a long tradition of teaching professional sailing techniques and racing strategies.

The event takes place in Palma de Mallorca and consists of a few short classroom briefings by Italian pro Roberto Ferrarese – a winner of the Admiral’s Cup, several World & European Championships, and a three-time America’s Cup athlete – and a series of races in the bay. The overall winners of the weekend move on to compete in the Copa Del Rey race later in the year. In the briefings, Roberto, alongside the successful German racer Markus Wieser, explained the principles behind sail racing: teamwork and communication, the need for tacticians, boat positioning, and foresight to be proactive not reactive when racing.

We were then unleashed to our boats to put these theories into practice. The learning curve was steep. Less than three hours earlier, half of our team hadn’t even stepped on a boat before – let alone operated a jib sail, constantly adapting and winching the sheets in tight for speed. But it wasn’t too long before we flew along with the boat heeling nicely, our crew of six perched high on the windward side to balance things out. I manned the mainsail and felt nervous about the boat capsizing so remained on the edge of my seat, ready to loosen the sails at the slightest gust. Gradually we got to grips with things, mainly thanks to Elenour, our extremely patient Catalan skipper, who kept her cool while five non-seafaring Brits did their best to practise tacking and gybing at speed.

The adrenaline really kicked in when the whistle blew, marking five minutes until the start of the race. Navigating a 25ft boat to the start line through choppy seas and gusting winds, whilst jostling for position with five other teams, is no easy task. The objective is to fly across the line exactly when the timer hits zero at the start of the race, but that’s easier said than done. In one of our previous attempts, we crossed the line before time and were given a penalty, and in another we were so far away that the race was half finished before we even crossed the start.

However, this time things are looking good. We slow our boat a few metres from the preferred side of the markers with just 15 seconds to spare, then pull the sails in tight and cross the line in prime position ready to tack our way to the windward buoy. I look back and see the Swedish and Danish teams hot on our heels. Earlier in the day we’d had a pretty intense lesson about velocity made good (VMG), calculating the best path to our destination and finding the balance between speed and distance. When faced with a headwind, only tacking – zigzagging directly into the wind – makes progress possible, but it requires finesse. We find an angle that makes us fly through the water but soon realise how far from the marker we’re veering, and find ourselves slipping behind. We reach the buoy in the middle of the pack and open the sails wide for the downwind leg.

We cross the line in third place – our best result of the weekend and not bad considering our extreme amateur status. I wasn’t sure what to expect from sail racing, and although competitive events aren’t usually my thing, the exhilaration of harnessing the power of the wind, being part of a team and finding the balance between being in control and riding by the seat of your pants was pretty incredible. And that’s exactly what the BMW sail-racing academy sets out to achieve in this unique training programme.

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November 10, 2009

The Fixed-Wing Is In: America's Cup Sailors Plan to Use Rigid Carbon-Fiber Airfoil on U.S. Entry

The U.S. team for the America's Cup is replacing its boat's mast and cloth mainsail with a hard, fixed wing that is 80 percent larger than a Boeing 747 wing, not to mention difficult and dangerous to maneuver

By Lynn Fitzpatrick

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SAN DIEGO—After more than a year of practicing for the America's Cup, the U.S. team is replacing its boat's lofty 60-meter mast and 620-square-meter cloth mainsail with a hard, fixed wing that is 80 percent larger than a Boeing 747 wing and will tower 58 meters above their giant trimaran's deck. The team, known as the BMW ORACLE Racing Team, will start to practice with and evaluate the high-strength yet lightweight carbon-fiber wing on its 27-meter carbon-composite trimaran later this week.  The Americans have been testing new frontiers with the loads that their massive multihull endures while sailing . Crash helmets, personal floatation devices and other body armor have been de rigueur during BMW ORACLE Racing's practices—even while using a mast and a mainsail, which preceded the wing. During a practice session on November 3, the boat's huge mast snapped and toppled into the Pacific. Thankfully, no one was injured. Although the team's research and development unit has been conducting a forensic evaluation of the mast mishap, another unit has been finishing the assembly of the wing under the cover of a huge tent at the team's base in San Diego, in an attempt to keep the technology a secret from competitors. The America’s Cup is the oldest actively contested trophy in sport and dates back to a race held in 1851 in England in which the yacht America beat 15 boats representing the Royal Yacht Squadron.  Members of the winning America syndicate donated the Cup via a Deed of Gift to the New York Yacht Club on July 8, 1857, specifying that it be held in trust as a perpetual challenge trophy to promote friendly competition among nations. According to an Allianz Economic Report conducted in co-operation with Tom Cannon, dean of Buckingham University Business School, the America's Cup ranks just behind the Olympics and the FIFA World Cup in terms of worldwide direct and indirect economic benefits that accrue to the winner and the event's host city. It is the largest inter-club sporting event in the world in terms of economic scale and impact. The only other time that a multihull and a wing have been used in the America's Cup was in 1988. Back then, the U.S. team defied tradition when they unveiled an 18-meter catamaran equipped with a wing to compete against New Zealand's 27-meter monohull. Burt Rutan , whose company Scaled Composites went on to win the Ansari X PRIZE for SpaceShipOne , and who worked with John Ronz, David Hubbard and Duncan MacLane on the 1988 wing, reflected on that achievement: "The wing-sail designs were more challenging (than aircraft wing applications) because they needed high lift in both directions and because we had a requirement to vary the wing twist to account for different wind gradients above the sea. An aircraft wing lifts in only one direction and does not have any twist control. On the wing-sail we twisted the third element and thus had to make it torsionally flexible." The scale of the 21st-century sailboat and wing is astronomical compared with the 1988 vintage. The 1988 wing height was slightly over 30 meters, and its area was approximately 165 square meters. The new wing's main element is a monolithic box with an aerodynamic nose along its leading edge. Hinges at different points along the main element's trailing edge can be adjusted to change the gap between the forward and the aft elements to adjust airflow depending on the wind velocity. The sections of the trailing element can be moved independently to induce camber (the asymmetry between the top and bottom curves of an airfoil), making it possible to flatten and even induce negative camber in the top section as well as camber in the opposite direction in the lower sections. According to BMW ORACLE Racing, "the primary advantage of the wing over a soft sail is that it is easier to control and does not distort. This makes it easier for the trimmers on board to maintain an optimum aerofoil shape in a wide range of conditions." Unlike conventional monohull and multihull sailboats , the BMW ORACLE team's trimaran sails upwind and downwind at apparent wind angles less than 30 degrees (Monohulls typically sail at between 30 and 40 degrees upwind.) On board the racing machine it always feels as if the wind is in the sailors' faces. The wing technology will improve the trimaran's apparent wind angle, and may enable the multihull to exceed  two to 2.5 times wind speed. The upcoming America's Cup challenge will be the first time ever that an onboard engine will be used to assist trimmers in controlling the massive foils by powering hydraulic controls for the wing and the forward sails. Mark Ott, co-founder and executive vice president of Seattle-based Harbor Wing Technologies, the first company to employ a wing that rotates 360 degrees and uses a multihull as a platform, commented, "BMW ORACLE'S boat represents the pinnacle of race boat design; however, the nature of this design limits the wing sail's range of motion due to the shroud and forestay wires used to support it. This design limitation causes these wing sails to be impractical for use by the average sailor. By not allowing the wing full 360-degree rotational capability in everyday sailing conditions, it is bound to it be held on a shroud wire by the wind and damaged, or worse, possibly causing the boat to capsize." All eyes will be watching to see how BMW will store the boat and the wing, because the latter is not nearly as easy to take down and stow as a cloth mainsail. The America's Cup showdown is set to take place in February 2010 in Valencia, Spain.

USA17 (BMW Oracle Racing 90)

In 2007 Russell Coutts approached VPLP to design USA 17 , the fastest racing sailing boat to contest the America’s Cup . Little did the team know that the project would take three years of relentless modifications, improvements and developments to produce a trimaran featuring 35 m floats and a 68 m pivoting wing mast! Proof of the pudding came in 2010 with victory over the Swiss catamaran Alinghi in both races of the 33rd America’s Cup in Valencia (Spain).

For VPLP, it was the most enriching and intense investment of time and energy that the firm had ever known. Winning the America’s Cup justified VPLP’s approach of continuously researching and testing hypotheses. It also vindicated the firm’s policy of optimizing weight, power and simple yet efficient sail plans, a policy applied to each and every boat designed by VPLP.

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The BMW Oracle Racing 90 trimaran is a lot of yacht

The BMW Oracle Racing 90 trimaran -- one of the largest, and possibly fastest, ever built -- hits the waters of Rosario Strait for initial sea trials. However, an ongoing court battle will determine if the boat is eligible to race in America's Cup.

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ANACORTES — It’s not that easy to make the jaws of old salts drop around Puget Sound, where shipyards have been cranking out boats of every conceivable size and shape for more than a century. But a carbon-fiber behemoth stalking the waters of Rosario Strait this week is getting the job done.

One look at this trimaran — one of the largest, and possibly fastest, ever built — as she lifts her sails and leaps into the breeze off Orcas Island leaves no doubt: This boat wasn’t built to spend a lifetime plodding through seawater.

She was meant to fly.

Not literally, in a Spruce Goose sort of way. Although in early testing, even in light winds, the behemoth BMW Oracle Racing yacht — which, depending on a court decision, may or may not compete for the America’s Cup in 2010 — has lifted her side floats almost as far out of the water as Howard Hughes’ famous seaplane ever rose.

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This is all by design, on a boat that can squeeze 40 knots out of 20 knots of wind and might yet become the fastest racing yacht ever known.

Even to the untrained eye, the boat, officially known as BMW Oracle Racing 90, is an engineering marvel, one that went from blueprints to sails-up in less than nine months.

Her sleek, carbon-fiber main hull is 100 feet long, stem to stern, and 90 feet at the waterline. Her twin floats are 90 feet apart, side to side. If you dropped the boat through the open roof of Safeco Field, it would cover the entire infield.

When the boat is pushed from its dock by four bumper boats, it appears as if a piece of the shore has just calved off.

The boat’s three hulls are connected by sweeping, aerodynamic carbon-fiber beams that look perilously thin. They have a unique droop to them, making the craft, from the front or rear, look a bit like a Klingon Bird of Prey spaceship from an old Star Trek movie.

The carbon-fiber mast, the only crucial part not fabricated on site in Anacortes (it was built in Rhode Island) is more than 5 feet wide at its elliptical base, and 158 feet tall.

The sails are similarly off the charts: a 5,000-square-foot mainsail; a 3,500-square-foot headsail; and 7,000-square-foot gennaker.

The boat will be sailed by about 15 sailors, wearing protective helmets and high-tech garb that looks like it’s borrowed from NASA.

Those are about the only hard facts revealed by BMW Oracle Racing, which will complete initial sea trials here Saturday, then prep the big boat for shipping on a barge to San Diego a week later. There, testing will be ramped up, as syndicate officials await the decision in a court case which might render the boat essentially useless, in America’s Cup terms.

A bitter fight

The pursuit of sporting’s oldest international prize has devolved into a bitter legal fight between two billionaires: Oracle software icon Larry Ellison of the Bay Area and Ernesto Bertarelli, a biotech mogul who runs the Swiss racing syndicate, Alinghi, which currently holds the Cup.

Since successfully defending the Cup in Valencia, Spain, last year (Ellison’s team again did not make the finals), Alinghi, to put it simply, has been unable to reach agreement with all competing syndicates on a fair format for the next Cup races.

Ellison’s BMW Oracle group last year won a court decision that named it the “challenger of record” for the next Cup, meaning they would negotiate the next Cup’s protocol with Alinghi. When Ellison and Bertarelli could not agree, both sides began preparing for the next remedy under Cup rules: a match race between their respective boats with essentially no design rules, other than a 90-foot maximum waterline.

That is the lesson lingering from a 1988 America’s Cup challenge, in which Dennis Conner’s Stars & Stripes won a legal decision allowing it to race a multihull against a slower, plodding New Zealand challenger in a San Diego race now considered a low point in Cup history. Since then, it has been taken as a given that any Cup challenge without protocols agreed to by the defender and challenger of record would be conducted in multihulls.

That’s what sent BMW Oracle’s design team into trimaran warp speed on Puget Sound, where the team had built four previous conventional carbon-fiber monohulls with Janicki Industries in Sedro-Woolley, and where other useful composite-construction infrastructure exists because of the local aerospace industry.

But last month, Alinghi won an appeal of that court decision, and announced plans to stage a traditional Cup defense, in monohull boats with multiple challengers, in Valencia as soon as 2009. Ellison’s group is making a final appeal of that appeal, with a decision expected in February or March.

$10 million bet

If Ellison wins, the big trimaran could race for the America’s Cup in what by all accounts would be a spectacular best-of-three multihull match race with Alinghi in 2010.

If it loses?

The designers likely scurry to build a new monohull. And the trimaran becomes a big, fast, very cool, black-and-white elephant, with design and construction costs estimated to be as high as $10 million.

This boat is, in other words, not only a hedge on a bet, but something of a guilty pleasure, and the BMW Oracle sailing team, based for now in Anacortes, is treating it as such. Not even the world’s greatest sailing racers have ever seen anything like it.

“We’re not even at 50 percent yet and it’s already pretty impressive,” said helmsman James Spithill of Australia, the former driver of the Seattle-based OneWorld Challenge Cup team in 2002.

Spithill and famed helmsman Russell Coutts of New Zealand both were hired by Ellison after his most recent, unsuccessful Cup effort, and both are now in Anacortes.

Initial driving duties, however, have fallen largely to Frenchman Franck Cammas, hired as a consultant because of his expertise with mega multihulls, which heretofore have been built primarily for open-ocean racing, and reach speeds up to 44 knots.

The new boat has been sailed only in light to moderate winds, progressively increasing loads on its joints and surfaces. But even at about half speed, the boat is a marvel in the water, its speed deceptive because of its massive size.

When its center hull clears the water and the craft seemingly takes flight, riding on only the knife edge of a single float at about 20 knots, it’s a spectacular sight.

Needless to say, the boat, visible from miles away and accompanied by a half-dozen chase boats, creates a spectacle in the otherwise quiet waters in the waning days of summer around the San Juans. Seagulls steer cautiously wide of it. Snoozing salmon trollers are startled to attention and sent reaching for cameras.

And despite the thrill it gives the sailing team, there’s still a bit of tension in the air whenever the big boat lifts off the water. For each voyage, the boat’s tenders carry — in addition to telemetry equipment monitoring onboard sensors — a physician and scuba divers in case of emergencies.

Design coordinator Mike Drummond, mindful of the high-stakes poker game with Alinghi, skillfully dodged most questions about the big boat’s particulars this week. But asked what keeps him awake at night during testing, he didn’t hesitate.

“Pretty much everything.”

Ron Judd: 206-464-8280 or at [email protected] .

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REVIEW. NEW WAVE SAILING: BMW SAIL RACING ACADEMY.

Palma de mallorca, spain..

When learning to sail, there is probably no better way to do so than off the coast of one of the most beautiful holiday destinations in Europe, with a world champion sailor as a teacher.

That was exactly what almost 30 BMW i Pure Impulse guests from Europe and North America came to Mallorca for. They were greeted by gorgeous sunshine when they arrived at the beautiful Hilton Sa Torre resort, a 14 th century historical property located on a serene spot on the island.

Refreshments and nibbles were served on the terrace, but there was not much time to admire the surroundings, as it was already time for the guests’ first sailing lesson.

Dressed in their official BMW sailing gear – which also was the giveaway for the weekend – guests met their coach, three-time America’s Cup sailor Roberto Ferrarese, who explained the basics of the sport. Then the guests stepped onto the five J/80 sailboats for their first on-water lessons. Afterwards, a well-deserved dinner awaited the sailors back at the hotel.

The next morning, it was time to explore the island during a Scenic Drive to the stunning Serra de Tramuntana mountain range in a mixed BMW fleet. A magnificent view over the mountains and the ocean and a delicious breakfast at the Ca’S Xorc hotel was an ample reward for an early morning wake-up call.

A full day of sailing followed. Ferrarese taught the participants the most important strategies and tactics for racing and beating the competition. Spirits where still high from a fun and successful day when guests finally sat down to dinner at Tast Club Palma in the evening.

On Sunday, it was time for the sailors to show off their newly acquired skills during a short competition. After the prize-giving ceremony and team pictures, a farewell lunch overlooking the impressive port was served on the first floor of the Real Club Náutico.

Then, sadly, it was time to head to the airport for some to catch their flights home, while several lucky guests had opted to extend their stay for a private holiday. All agreed that it was an amazing weekend where some of them had found a new hobby to pursue in the future.

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Legal Duel Could Make High-Tech Boat a Relic

By Christopher Clarey

• Dec. 4, 2008

SAN DIEGO — Already looking suspiciously like a relic of an era of excess, the massive black trimaran sailboat belonging to BMW Oracle Racing was docked in San Diego harbor last week, its towering mast giving the high-rise hotels some competition.

“I’m staying on the 13th floor, and I’m not at the mast yet,” said the skipper, Russell Coutts, gesturing at his hotel between bites of a sandwich. “I’m looking down from the hotel thinking, ‘Wow, that’s what it must look like from the top of that thing.’ ”

That thing — dubbed Dogzilla by the sailing community — is the latest high-tech racing machine created at great if undisclosed expense with the America’s Cup in mind. It has been clocked at speeds twice that of the wind.

But with a long-running lawsuit continuing to generate much more drag than this leviathan’s computer-designed hulls, it is anybody’s guess whether BMW Oracle’s monster three-hulled boat will ever be used in the Cup.

If BMW Oracle wins an appeal in the New York courts sometime next year, the team may race its trimaran against one being designed by Alinghi, the defender of the America’s Cup, in a one-on-one series under the rules outlined in the Cup’s governing document, the Deed of Gift.

In Cup parlance, that would be a Deed of Gift match, or DOG match (hence the trimaran’s provocative nickname, which its crew and designers have yet to embrace).

But BMW Oracle and its owner, the American software billionaire Larry Ellison, could decide to drop the lawsuit, which was begun last year in the belief that Alinghi had made an unseemly power grab when it picked a newly constituted Spanish yacht club as its official challenger and then published race rules widely viewed as one-sided.

If the lawsuit is withdrawn, Alinghi has already announced that the next Cup — scaled down for the new economic realities — will be staged in traditional monohull yachts in Valencia, Spain, in 2010.

Even if Oracle does not succumb to mounting peer pressure and end the legal action, it could still lose in court, which would mean that the trimaran in San Diego Harbor, 90 feet by 90 feet with a 158-foot mast, would be reduced to a white elephant. Or would it?

“I think we’ll try to set a few speed records with the boat if it doesn’t get used,” Ellison, the software impresario, said in a telephone interview. “We’ll find something to do with it. Priority 1 is to get the America’s Cup back on track.

“The reason this boat was built was for the Deed of Gift match, so if we win the America’s Cup we can go back to a fair set of rules and a multichallenger event where the rules are the same for everybody,” Ellison said. “That’s the primary purpose of this boat, and if we get there, however we get there, I’ll be happy.”

For the moment, happiness is an elusive emotion in Cup circles. Securing sponsorship, already a daunting challenge because of the uncertainty generated by the lawsuit, has become even harder with the global economic downturn.

Would-be challengers have scaled back plans and payrolls radically. Alinghi, owned by the Swiss billionaire Ernesto Bertarelli, has resorted to cutbacks and layoffs, including dropping one of its two sailing crews.

And Alinghi is still negotiating to extend its deal with one of its primary sponsors, the Swiss bank UBS, which has been hit particularly hard by the financial crisis.

Even BMW Oracle, with its primary sponsors still on board and Ellison’s billions for backup, is apparently sparing expenses. Its temporary base in San Diego was long on trimaran but short on creature comforts, with the team operating out of shipping containers in a converted fenced-in lot at which no fewer than 20 parking spaces were occupied last week by a reserve mast laid flat.

Although modern America’s Cup teams traditionally prize security and secrecy, curiosity-seekers in San Diego had no problem getting a close look at the trimaran. All they had to do was walk to the end of the terrace at Joe’s Crab Shack, which is precisely what some of Alinghi’s emissaries did earlier this year when they came to spy in plain view.

What they saw should not have reassured them, according to Coutts. It is not the largest multihull racing sailboat in the world: Banque Populaire V, launched in France earlier this year, is about 130 feet long.

But Coutts said the BMW Oracle boat was “the fastest,” and while most big trimarans were built for offshore racing, this one was designed for inshore racing.

“It’s much lighter, more powerful with a much bigger mast, sails and so forth and much more extreme,” he said. “This boat is a no-compromise lightweight flyer basically, so there’s a huge difference.”

Coutts, a New Zealander with a Dudley Do-Right jaw, is no multihull expert. He made his name as a supreme helmsman of monohulls. He has already won the America’s Cup three times: twice with Team New Zealand and once with Alinghi in 2003 before parting acrimoniously with the Swiss-based syndicate and Bertarelli.

After Coutts sat out last year’s Cup, Ellison hired him to run his team after Oracle was eliminated early from the challenger series, the Louis Vuitton Cup. Coutts’s new role has only complicated matters in the legal duel with Bertarelli and Alinghi.

Rapprochement is not out of the question, but unlike Alinghi, which is still building its multihull, BMW Oracle’s backup plan is already afloat and casting very long shadows across the Pacific.

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Italian Grand Prix: Lewis Hamilton 'furious' after feeling he threw away pole position - 'No one to blame but myself'

Mercedes' Lewis Hamilton mystified at another disappointing Qualifying performance as he ends up P6 for Italian Grand Prix - "The team deserve better. Maybe they will get that with Kimi Antonelli"; watch Sunday's race from Monza live on Sky Sports F1 at 2pm

Saturday 31 August 2024 22:35, UK

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A "furious" Lewis Hamilton said Mercedes "deserved better" after feeling he had thrown away the chance of pole position at the Italian Grand Prix.

Hamilton topped the timesheets in second and third practice at Monza but could only muster sixth place in Qualifying - a week after finishing P12 for the Dutch Grand Prix.

The 39-year-old will join Ferrari from 2025 and even quipped that his replacement at the Silver Arrows, Andrea Kimi Antonelli, will be an upgrade as he lamented his performance.

• Mercedes confirm Andrea Kimi Antonelli as Lewis Hamilton replacement from 2025
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A downbeat Hamilton told Sky Sports' Rachel Brookes: "I am furious, absolutely furious. I could have been on pole, at least on the front row. I just didn't do the job at the end.

"I lost a tenth and a half through Turns One and Two, and then a tenth in the last corner. No one to blame but myself. Qualifying has been my weakness for a minute now and I can't figure it out.

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"I will be kicking myself for the next couple of hours but I need to move forward. We have a good race car, the team have done an amazing job this weekend, they really have.

"The car felt better than last race and the team deserve better. Maybe they will get that with Kimi [Antonelli]."

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Hamilton added: "It was absolutely ridiculous from my side and completely unacceptable.

"I'm just not very good at qualifying, simple as. It is unbelievably frustrating but I will keep working. That's all I can do."

Russell: McLarens 'could sail into distance'

Hamilton's team-mate George Russell qualified in third place, behind McLaren's Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri, and feels the top two could "sail into the distance" during the race.

Russell is pinning his hopes on Norris and Piastri making poor starts, as they did at Zandvoort last Sunday when they lost a place each on the first lap, having qualified first and third respectively.

The Mercedes driver said: "McLaren are so quick, super impressive. Hopefully they keep up their start performance but if they don't I think they will be sailing into the distance.

"That is where F1 is at the moment. McLaren are the team to beat. If we don't get past them at the start, it will be difficult for anyone to keep up."

Norris trails Red Bull's Max Verstappen by 70 points in the Drivers' Championship after winning the Dutch Grand Prix and Russell thinks Piastri could help his team-mate triumph at Monza if the opportunity arises.

He said: "If Oscar is second, he might make a gap and secure the win for Lando. Hopefully it doesn't pan out like that and we are fighting until the end but any team in their position would do the same."

Verstappen qualified down in seventh and bemoaned his car's grip, saying: "It is very difficult to drive and find a good balance.

"If you have one issue and try to fix that, then there is another issue. It's not very driveable, let's put it like that."

Sky Sports F1's live Italian GP schedule

Sunday September 1 7:30am: F3 Feature Race 9am: F2 Feature Race 11am: Porsche Supercup 12:30pm: Grand Prix Sunday: Italian GP build-up 2pm: The ITALIAN GRAND PRIX 4pm: Chequered Flag: Italian GP reaction 5pm: Ted's Notebook

Watch the Italian Grand Prix live this Sunday at 2pm on Sky Sports F1. Stream every F1 race and more with a NOW Sports Month Membership, No contract, cancel anytime.

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