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Featured Stories | August 26, 2013

Inside the fastest boats in america’s cup history with mit meche.

By Genevieve Wanucha

“….It’s a clean start!” the America’s Cup commentator shouted yesterday . “And the Kiwis take the lead!” Two sailboats blasted through a foggy San Francisco Bay, dueling for a chance to race against the defending champion Oracle Team USA. Minutes later, Emirates Team New Zealand sailed to victory past Italy’s Luna Rossa Challenge, and now wait to confront their formidable rival in the finals on September 7.

The America’s Cup is the world’s oldest sporting trophy, backed by 162 years of sailing tradition. This year’s motto hints of something new: ‘Best Sailors. Fastest Boats.’ After winning the last cup in Valencia, Spain, in 2010, Larry Ellison, the billionaire entrepreneur and the owner of Oracle Team USA, pushed to reinvent the competition into a spectacular television-friendly event. He got his way—big time. The 2013 America’s Cup is now taking place much closer to the shore, within view of cheering spectators, music concerts, and grandstands. The biggest change is the newfangled boat design.

The new yacht, called the AC72 (America’s Cup 72 class), is unlike any sailboat that’s ever raced in an America’s Cup. The 72-foot-long, wing-sailed catamaran can travel more than twice as fast as the boats that competed in 2010. When the slick carbon-fiber crafts really get going, both hulls levitate out of the water and begin to fly over the surface on retractable underwater appendages called hydrofoils. The decrease in drag during foiling mode can boost the yacht’s speed past 45 knots, or 52 miles per hour. “It’s surreal,” says Team New Zealand’s wing trimmer Glenn Ashby.

Several professors in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering , experts in naval architecture, marine hydrodynamics, and fluid mechanics, know a thing or two about sailboat design. Some have led the design of past U.S. America’s Cup boats. And they say that these AC72s have sailed straight into a new frontier in advanced marine technology. So, Oceans at MIT invited professors Doug Hart , Paul Sclavounos , and Jerome Milgram to answer a few questions about the fastest yachts in America’s Cup history. Knowing what they know will change the way you watch the race.

What makes the AC72 catamarans so fast and unique?

“In order to counter the side force generated by the sails, boats must have a wing shape below the water that generates a force in the opposite direction. Catamarans use long thin rudders and hydrofoils near the center of the hull called daggerboards. The AC72’s are unique in that they have rudders and daggerboards designed to push up on the hulls and lift them out of the water while, at the same time, countering the sideways force of the sails.

In addition, AC72s use “wing” sails rather than the typical canvas sails you see on most sailboats. These are structures built very much like the wings of an airplane.  They are “monocoque”-type structures, which means that part of the load is carried by the outer skin. This support allows the sails to be very thin and ridged. This design provides a means of controlling and optimizing the shape of the sails in ways that traditional canvas sails can not be controlled or optimized.

Finally, as with all catamarans, the hulls are long and thin. The force on the sails acting to flip the boat is countered by the weight of the crew and the weight of the part of the boat that is upwind of the sail. The two hulls of catamarans can be separated by considerable distances providing significant leverage against flipping. The long thin hulls also generate little wave drag (drag caused by the generation of waves by the boat itself) and help to pierce oncoming ocean waves rather than slamming into them and decelerating the boat.”

Designing innovative yachts must involve a great amount of fluid mechanics or marine hydrodynamics. What specific research areas are critical for this kind of sailboat design?

Paul Sclavounos, MIT PhD ’81, Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Naval Architecture. Interests: Marine Hydrodynamics, Marine & Mechanical Engineering. Professor Sclavounos has been a design contributor to three America’s Cup syndicates.

“The design of the new AC72 boats is a complex process lying at the intersection of a number of disciplines; marine hydrodynamics, aerodynamics, structural mechanics, advanced composites, and optimization theory. Of these disciplines the ones that are critical for the design of AC72 boats are marine hydrodynamics, aerodynamics and carbon fiber composites. The fluid dynamics involved in the design of the AC72 boat may now he handled reliably by computer programs that solve the Reynolds Averaged Navier Stokes Equations reducing the need for extensive tank and wind tunnel testing.”

Jerome Milgram , MIT PhD ’65, Professor of Mechanical and Ocean Engineering, William I. Koch Professor of Marine Technology, Emeritus. Professor Milgram has been a design contributor to more than eight America’s Cup syndicates.

“For the hydrofoil boats, called foilers, the fluid mechanics of lift is paramount. It differs from the lift of airplanes in that there is a free surface (water) very close to the foils, whereas an airplane lifts in nearly an infinite fluid (air). Lift in the presence of a free surface is the new field of fluid mechanics for foiling boats. In an ordinary boat, there is lift in the form of side force generated to counterbalance the side force of the sails. However, most of the lifting surface of an ordinary sailboat (the downward-projecting centerboard ) is further from the free surface than is the case with a foiler, on which most of the underwater appendage is horizontal and close to the free surface. (See this video: Hydrofoils: Flying on Water )

The new AC boats have rigid wings instead of fabric sails. Their elliptical leading edges can have a suction force on them, which cancels out much of the drag. Thus, the drag coefficient of a rigid wing can be much lower than the drag coefficient of a sail. Furthermore, rigid wings can withstand small areas of pressure difference reversal that would cause an ordinary sail to luff, or flap. This increases in the amount of available control of the lift distribution.”

“Sailing yacht design is extremely complex. Sailboats are anything but simple – generally far more complex then airplanes. They are a balance of compromises between rules governing their construction, structural properties of the materials they are made from, wind and water forces, crew safety, and the controls needed to operate them. While a tremendous amount of modern technology and numerical modeling goes into the designs of these yachts, much of their design is based on practical experience, experimentation, and trial and error. Sailboat races are often won by fractions of a percent difference in overall speed. These differences can be the result of the ability to out maneuver the other boat, point slightly higher into the wind or any number of other factors. Such tiny differences are very difficult to account for by simple numerical modeling thus, yacht design is still very much an art.”

Are there any downsides to this AC design?

Jerome Milgram:

The interaction of a high speed boat with waves is different than the wave interaction of an ordinary low speed boat. When an AC boat traveling at high speeds has its bow hit a wave, the wave can cause an instantaneous increase in drag, slowing the boat with the air wing force and the inertial force of the boat slowing down can cause the boat to pitch pole. Unfortunately, there has been one death due to this kind of inertial and hydrodynamic interaction between the boat and sea waves.

There is some criticism of this departure from tradition and of the increased danger associated with the new design. But, others are excited to see this as more of a spectator sport and demonstration of futuristic technology. What is your personal reaction to this sea change in the America’s Cup?

Paul Sclavounos:

“There is a long and illustrious history of Americas’ Cup mono-hull yachts and many are nostalgic of this tradition. The innovations introduced under the IACC rule have led to outstanding boats that had almost exhausted every corner of the rule, leading to margins of victory often less than a minute for a three-hour race. The new Americas’ Cup rule represents an evolution that is, in a sense, a consequence of the maturity of the designs developed under the previous rule.

The design of the AC72 yachts draws upon advanced marine technologies, e.g. computational fluid dynamics and advanced composites, increasingly used for the design of other marine structures, e.g. fuel-efficient ships, composite mooring systems for offshore platforms and multi-megawatt offshore wind turbines. As has been the case in the past, the races of new AC72 boats will be exciting, and they stand to raise an awareness of the importance of technology in the design of advanced marine vehicles. As to the dangers associated with the new design, it is a risk that is hopefully small yet to a certain degree inevitable given that a new frontier in yachting is being explored.”

“I see both sides of this issue and each has merit. The boats do depart from tradition and are certainly dangerous, but they have the thrill of very high speed. I would not personally get on one of these boats. I have too much sense for that. Others see it differently.”

“While safety is certainly a major concern, as an engineer, I find these new yacht designs extremely exciting. My own feeling is that the America’s Cup races became too bogged down in rules and lost sight of what made them exciting. I hope these new yachts spark people’s imagination and usher in a new generation of young sailing enthusiasts.”

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Artemis Racing launches first AC72 catamaran

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THE UNTOLD STORY OF THE BIRTH OF FOILING IN THE AMERICA’S CUP

In late August 2012 a grainy photo of a boat emerged online. Most hardened America’s Cup followers will clearly remember the image that was the talk of the sailing world for many weeks.

A high angle shot, looking down on a giant 72 foot red and black Emirates Team New Zealand catamaran seemingly flying above the waters of the Auckland’s Waitemata Harbour.

Debate raged:

“OMG photoshopped of course,”

“Can't be foiling - anyone can see from that picture they're simply launched off a wave.”

“On close inspection it is photoshop. You can see where the bow and stern were in the water. They have cut, lifted an pushed the boat forward 1/2 a boat length. Shame. That was cool for about 5 min”

An image that was so far outside the realms of the imagination of most people- but not those inside the base of Emirates Team New Zealand.

The cat was out of the bag, foiling had arrived. But there had been many months of secretive R&D meetings at Emirates Team New Zealand that went into developing a concept that would transform the world of America’s Cup racing forever.

Rewind to 2011, two years out from the 34th America’s Cup in San Francisco. A time of any campaign where teams are thinking outside the square with weird and wonderful ideas having been studying the AC72 class rule, looking for loopholes and testing or attempting to validate some of the most innovative theories. A crazy concept was continuing to circle within Emirates Team New Zealand.

“What if we could make the AC72 catamaran fly above the water?”

Was there a way to design a control system within the rules to move the daggerboards in the water to create enough lift to support the weight of five saloon cars on a surface area the size of a desk?

In 2011, simulation was not at the required level of technology that it is today, so testing and ideas had to be validated on the water.

The challenge was how to keep such a crazy concept of foiling secret.

Auckland Harbour was a goldfish bowl to tens of thousands of eyeballs which would gawk at a vessel levitating above the water and sailing faster than most engine powered boats on the harbour, so a more discreet location was required.

And so, the first testing of the concept of foiling for America’s Cup all started on a remote and narrow lake in the middle of the Waikato region - Lake Arapuni - as a covert mission with a boat affectionally nicknamed, ‘The Waka’.

Things got off to a rocky start. Early on in the ultra-covert project, while towing the Waka south, a small group of team members (who shall remain nameless) had to call the team CEO Grant Dalton to explain there was a slight curveball in the operation. The top-secret test platform was now firmly the centre of public attention because they had neglected to tie it to the trailer appropriately and it had slipped off and was causing a multi mile traffic jam on Auckland’s Southern Motorway.

The issue was swiftly resolved, and adversity overcome. The operation was back on track.

Glenn Ashby was relatively new to the team back then and quickly understood that foiling was not just a whacky fad but something that had to be kept under wraps.

“We made sure we were not in branded team kit. To anyone walking the dog around the lake, we probably just appeared like a few old battlers towing a beat-up old catamaran down the lake for fun.” Said Ashby

“We just had quite a few people with cameras, computers and pelican cases in tow.”

It wasn’t an instant success, but it didn’t take long for the gigantic gains that foiling presented to emerge.

“After a couple of weeks of tuning and building new foils we got to the stage where we were able to tow the boat and pop out of the water and fly stably.

The Waka was a fantastic boat to learn all about foils, to understand what you could and couldn’t do, and potentially what the future could hold for us.”

“Some of those evenings where we would sit around the table, knowing we were pioneering absolutely new ground in the America’s Cup and in foiling multihulls and foiling boats was a pretty special feeling. Sitting there with the designers and the sailing team really knowing that you were part of such a special period of America’s Cup history in the making.” Recalled Ashby

The concept continued to grow legs and the operation eventually moved back up to Auckland and the backblocks of the Hauraki Gulf.

“Eventually we put all that technology and testing into use on our SL33 catamaran and, ultimately, we built our AC72 catamaran with fully foiling in mind. We knew we could do it, and we knew we had to push hard and push big because absolutely we could see that foiling was the future.”

Ultimately the innovative foiling golden bullet from New Zealand didn’t win the 35th America’s Cup for Emirates Team New Zealand, but it did change the face of top-level yacht racing forever. And it did install the belief in the team that being different and pushing the boundaries, throwing the ball as far as we could in innovation was the secret to success which eventually came in Bermuda in 2017.

“I think back fondly of those times in 2012 and how foiling was really born on a lake in the middle of the Waikato in little old New Zealand.”

Now, two years out from AC36 in 2021, as quiet as it seems from all America’s Cup teams, you can be rest assured there are plenty of innovative ideas being tested within design offices around the world, that could be the next quantum leap forward in technology on or off the water.

Time will tell.

Golden Gate YC : P ress Release Multihulls for America's Cup 2013

The catamaran will be able to fly a hull in 5 to 6 knots true windspeed.  The target boatspeeds in winds under 10 knots were set at 1.2 times the true windspeed upwind and 1.6 times true windspeed downwind. 

High speeds are derived from enormous power.  The AC72 has a righting moment of approximately 60-ton-meters.  Determining the sail plan dimensions was difficult because the boat has to be powerful in light winds and not overpowered in stronger winds. 

“It’s been challenging to have the cat fully powered-up and flying a hull in light winds, yet also able to sail in 30 knots,” Melvin said.  “We put a lot of time and effort into sizing the wingsail and the platform dimensions in order to sail in that full range.”

The height of the wingsail will be approximately 40 meters (130 feet) with a maximum chord length between 10 and 11 meters (32 and 36 feet). 

Two options for depowering are removable flaps on the upper leech or a removable mast tip.  Both options would reduce sail and weight. 

With such a wide boat, additional structure has been required to optimize the longitudinal stability of the AC72 to dampen flexing and to resist the high forestay loads. 

A draft of the AC72 Rule has been completed and the final rule will be issued by September 30. 

Other highlights of the new class:

• Ease of assembly: The AC72 can be assembled in two days and disassembled in one to accommodate the shipping schedule for the America’s Cup World Series events.  • Platform configuration: Either a conventional layout catamaran, one with cockpits and helmsman stations in both hulls, or teams will have an option of designing a central pod to centralize all the wing and sail-handling controls.  • Wingsail or soft sails: The AC72 class rule allows for wingsail and soft sail options to promote racing through a broad range of conditions.  • Power source: Engines are banned but electrically driven valves to control the wingsail might be permitted.  • Rudders and daggerboards: The rule limits a maximum of four underwater appendages, two rudders and two daggerboards.  To reduce costs, standardized, one-design daggerboards are being considered.  • Construction materials and methods: Limits on high-modulus carbon-fiber have been put in place for hull construction.  The class rule outlines a minimum outside skin weight of 600 grams per square meter, similar to other racing boats of that size.  Core materials may either be foam or honeycomb.  High-modulus carbon will be allowed in the wing sail, to add stiffness and strength.  • Onboard cameramen will be carried during racing.   

The Youth America’s Cup and AC45

The next generation of sailing heroes will be created by the Youth America’s Cup, a new global sports event that will take place annually from 2012.

National teams will compete in the AC45, the new, fast, wingsail one-design catamaran that America's Cup teams will race during 2011.

Competition rules for the Youth America’s Cup are in development and will be announced by June 2011, following the close of the challenge period for America's Cup teams.

The AC45 is not only a launch pad for young sailors around the world, but will also fast-track America's Cup teams straight to the latest state-of-the-art wingsail technology.

The AC45 class will be managed by the new independent America's Cup Race Management and built by Core Builders in Warkworth, New Zealand.

Six new boats are underway with hull no.1 due to be launched in December 2010. All America’s Cup teams will be invited to take part in the sea trials.

The platforms, hulls and cross beams, will be delivered to America’s Cup teams with all composite work completed. Only assembly, painting and instrumentation fit-out will remain.

The wingsails will be supplied either as a finished product or in a kit with assemblage information supplied as per the class rule.  

Related Links:

Read Protocol for the 34th America's Cup (41 pages, pdf)

At America's Cup Official Web site: View Press Conference Video

Additional Links and Info:

Visit Golden Gate YC website

Visit Club Nautico di Roma website  

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To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories .

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The Boat That Could Sink the America's Cup

Larry Ellison planned the biggest, fastest, and most exciting yacht race in history. Maybe too big: His massive catamarans are so expensive that only four teams plan to compete this summer. Then Team Oracle wrecked one in San Francisco Bay, showing just how fragile the big boat, and the event itself, really is. Breaking: Sweden’s Artemis Racing team crashed its AC72 in San Francisco Bay during a practice run on Thursday, May 9. One crew member was reported killed in the accident, and the boat was severely damaged and may not be salvageable. How this will affect the team and the overall America’s Cup competition remains to be seen.

Ten minutes before the crash, Jimmy Spithill is in his element. On a brisk October afternoon on San Francisco Bay, Spithill is working with his team, practicing for the America’s Cup, the biggest prize in sailing. He won the event in 2010 for Larry Ellison’s Team Oracle, becoming, at 30, the youngest winning skipper in the event’s 162-year history. Among the spoils for the winning team is the prerogative to rewrite the rules of the competition, including determining the shape and construction of the boats that will be used in the next go-round. This is why today Spithill is sailing a $10 million AC72 — a radical new yacht for a radically reimagined yacht race.

The AC72 is a catamaran: a scrim of netting stretched between twin knifelike hulls, each 72 feet long but only a few feet wide. A series of interconnected cockpits carved into the narrow hulls allows the crew to hunker down and grind two-man winches. Connecting the two blades are girderlike crossbeams. Topping it all off is a rigid wing — 13 stories tall — that does double duty as both the boat’s engine and a billboard for the massive egos that animate the race. Each team builds a slightly different variation of the AC72, but the general size and shape were devised by Ellison’s people at Team Oracle.

Spithill’s job right now is the same as every other America’s Cup captain’s — to discover and push the limits of this new boat. The team keeps track of top speeds, and with each new day on the water they inch that number up. Today is day eight of testing, and the crew is approaching its 40th hour under sail. At 3 pm they’re just east of Alcatraz and considering their options. The wind is blowing at 20 knots and climbing. The AC72 is designed to sail in winds between 5 and 30 knots. Should they head to the South Bay, where winds are lighter? Spithill decides to go for one last lap in front of the Golden Gate. He wants to see what his beast of a boat can do.

He sets a course along the northern shore of San Francisco, aiming for a spot halfway between Alcatraz and the bridge. He’s in race mode, and the track he’s on is close to the one he’d sail if he were really competing. It’s nearly identical to the course he has already run four or five times today — with two subtle differences. The wind, already strong, is now a few knots stronger. And the day’s tide is nearing its maximum ebb. Twenty-eight-knot gusts push in through the Gate while water drains out of the bay at 5 to 6 knots. Taken together, the forces acting on the boat are the equivalent of 33-knot gusts: gale-force conditions. And 33 knots is well beyond the AC72’s comfort zone. But come race day, this is right where Spithill will want the boat to be.

By the time he gets past Alcatraz, Spithill and crew find themselves in massive chop, a product of the tide and wind working against each other. And they are driving into it at full throttle. The only way to avoid getting battered is to turn and go back, risking what’s known as the “death zone” in the middle of the turn. Spithill embraces his only option. “We went for it,” he says later.

Turning from an upwind heading to a downwind heading is a basic maneuver in a conventional sailboat. “If you ever got into trouble,” Spithill says, “you would just pull the sails down.” But on a wingsailed catamaran, that’s not possible. Because of the AC72’s very power and efficiency, the boat’s design is its own worst enemy when it has to turn and sail square to the wind. With no way to switch a wingsail off, there’s only one way to get through the death zone: as quickly as possible. It requires a coordinated team effort. The sails have to be depowered, the daggerboards (retractable keels that drop from the center of each of the catamaran’s twin hulls) have to be adjusted, and the helmsman has to carve the tiller — all in split-second coordination. But on this windy afternoon, there’s a fumble. At about 40 miles per hour, one of the hulls catches an edge, twisting the frame of the boat into a nosedive. “The rudders lifted out of the water,” Spithill recalls.

It’s the sailing equivalent of the steering wheel coming off in his hands. Without steerage, there’s no way to keep the wind from pounding down the wing. The boat pitchpoles into an ass-over-teakettle capsize: bows down, rudders up — putting Team Oracle on a heading straight for the bottom of the bay. They’re going over. What Spithill doesn’t realize, however, is that the entire vision for the new America’s Cup is about to turn upside down with him.

Ellison is not the first billionaire to get glamoured by the America’s Cup trophy. In fact, in many ways, the race is perhaps best understood as a pissing contest between the world’s richest men. The names are familiar from the history books and nightly news: Forbes, Vanderbilt, Morgan, Lipton, Sopwith, Turner, Koch. The stories are the stuff of yachting lore, told by the light of a campfire in the Bohemian Grove or swapped over Manhattans at the Knickerbocker Club on Fifth Avenue. The origin myth involves Queen Victoria watching a winner-take-all race around the Isle of Wight between a Yankee schooner named the America and 14 of the best boats in Britain — including the cream of the elite Royal Yacht Squadron. When a lookout spied the America coming toward the finish line in first place, the Queen asked who was in second. The answer: “Ah, Your Majesty, there is no second.”

The America won because its owners experimented with novel nautical technologies and spared no expense in building it (some things never change). In the 19th century, a ship in private hands that could beat the best that the British had to offer was something extraordinary — an example of private money rivaling the power of a great nation. The Cup has been a totem to tycoons ever since.

In the modern era of the Cup, post–World War II, the contest has become a little less of a free-for-all. Competitors, led by the holder of the Cup, usually agree in advance to sail variations of the same class of boat — the official specs are called the “box rule” or “formula rule.” In the past 55 years, there have been two such specs: a 12-meter-class rule, which held until the late ’80s, then the international-class rule, which doubled the length of the boats. Limits on boat sizes, however, didn’t mean limits on egos. America’s Cup boats in the ’50s and ’60s invariably had yachty names like Weatherly , Intrepid , Ranger , even Dame Pattie . Later boats conjured up their countries of origin in a running battle between the New World and the newer world: It was Freedom , Stars & Stripes , America³ , and Young America versus Southern Cross , Australia , NZL-32 , and NZL-60 . The men who financed and sometimes even helmed these boats saw themselves as puffed-up proxies for their countries.

But the most naked clash of egos and billfolds plays out in the no-limit contests, the so-called deed-of-gift races — anything-goes throwbacks to the old 19th-century rules, triggered when one billionaire decides that he no longer wants to play nice and rejects the limits imposed by a rule. The contest in 2010 was a deed-of-gift race and proved a high-water mark for ostentation. It was Larry Ellison versus Ernesto Bertarelli. The Italian billionaire is currently 94th on Forbes  ’ list of the world’s wealthiest. Ellison weighs in at number five. Bertarelli showed up in a carbon-fiber catamaran with a mast 203 feet tall. Ellison topped him (in every sense), building a carbon-fiber trimaran with a hard wing 223 feet high — so tall it couldn’t fit under the Golden Gate Bridge. The contest was like nothing the sailing world had ever seen — a real-life Godzilla versus Mechagodzilla. Some argued that they weren’t even sailboats anymore, strictly speaking: The sails were so enormous that both vessels had to have motorized winches to pull the lines.

Having won the Cup in the deed-of-gift match, Ellison decided that he wanted to have it both ways for the next contest, the party he would throw in 2013. He wanted a return to a gentlemanly rule, but he also wanted to see the kind of balls-to-the-wall machine that he won with. 1 The AC72-class rule is the result.

The change of the spec from traditional soft-sailed monohulls to the new wingsailed twin hulls came with a media strategy explicitly designed to turn the America’s Cup into a real spectator sport. There wasn’t going to be just an America’s Cup, there was going to be a brand-new yacht-racing league — the America’s Cup World Series. The teams would barnstorm around the world, racing shrunken versions of the AC72 — called AC45s — to drum up interest in the main event. For Ellison the game now wasn’t about putting his name on a bigger boat. It was about putting his name on a bigger event.

For its part, the AC45 proved plenty exciting. The fast, jittery boats were prone to crashing: They crashed during the testing period in Auckland’s Hauraki Gulf. They crashed while racing in the World Series. Last year in the gusty, choppy conditions typical of a San Francisco summer, three AC45s went daggerboards up over a four-day practice period. After a crash, chase boats would simply come along and pull the AC45s upright.

But the real show, of course, isn’t the AC45s. It’s the Louis Vuitton Cup, the name of the America’s Cup elimination round — the playoffs, if you will — which starts July 4 and will feature the larger AC72s. This is the race series that will determine who competes in the America’s Cup itself, September’s two-boat duel between the winner of the Louis Vuitton Cup and Team Oracle, which gets to defend its title on home turf.

Planners originally anticipated at least a 14-team battle. In fact there are only three teams fighting for the right to challenge Oracle: Prada Luna Rossa, Artemis Racing, and Emirates Team New Zealand. The thin field is a direct result of the AC72. Its performance has proven even more awesome than advertised, but the boats have turned out to be simply too expensive for many racing teams.

Still, though there are only four teams, racing the big AC72s promises to be far more exciting than even watching the World Series boats. In higher winds, the AC72s can hydrofoil — quite literally fly — thanks to trick daggerboards that lift both hulls out of the water. And crowds are sure to throng to the shore, watching for AC72 crashes, like they did for the AC45 in the World Series. What could be more thrilling than seeing the big boat go over at 40 miles an hour? At least that was the idea — until Jimmy Spithill actually crashed one.

Splashing down face-first catapults the two hulls upright and momentarily triples the force of gravity. The boat’s speed goes from 40 mph to zero in an instant. No one is thrown overboard, but there is a tumble belowdecks as the 14 crewmates dive into the cockpits and fall on top of one another.

Spithill looks out to see the tip of his 13-story wing dipping into the water. He realizes that if the worst were to happen, if the wing were to snap from the body of the boat, then the hulls would turn turtle — pinning all of them underwater and giving them only the pocket of air inside the overturned cockpits to breathe. He gives the order to abandon ship.

The Oracle race crew starts climbing down to the bottom-most cockpit, where it’s possible to crawl out. From there, still a good 15 feet in the air, they jump into the cold bay, one by one, to be picked up by Ian Burns, the team’s design coordinator, who was following Spithill in one of four chase-boats.

It takes 10 minutes to get everyone off the boat and out of harm’s way, during which time the boat is slowly sinking. The plan is simple — just right the boat the way the crews righted the smaller AC45s: Attach a line between the high side of the craft and one of the chase boats, gun the throttle, pull the catamaran onto its side, then reorient and pull it upright. So, still wet from his swim, Spithill grabs a towrope from the deck of the chase boat, jumps back onto his AC72, and hauls himself up the netting to get to the highest point: the stern. There he ties the line and throws it back to the crew on one of the speedboats. Once the line is attached, he crouches down in a cockpit and braces for impact as the speedboat hits the throttle. The AC72 is jerked onto its side. There’s another climb and another towline secured, again to the high side of the boat. Once again the speed boat hits the throttle. But this time it’s not enough. The AC72 can’t be pulled upright. It’s too big and too submerged. The implications are enormous. The boat — with Spithill on board and dragging the speedboat like a loose anchor — gets swept out under the Golden Gate Bridge and into the truly rough water of the open Pacific.

On October 16, Team Oracle USA capsized its new $10 million boat in San Francisco Bay. The mishap had a chilling effect on the whole America’s Cup organization. Here’s how the disaster unfolded over 10 hours.

1 | 3:08 PM: The boat capsizes in the bay, doing a face-plant that lifts some members of the crew 45 feet in the air.

2 | 3:27 PM: While the sailors scramble off the boat, 25 knots of pressure pushes the wing under the waves.

3 | 3:44 PM: A speedboat is able to jerk the AC72 onto its side but cannot bring it upright.

4 | 4:02 PM: Now dragging the speedboat, the AC72 gets swept under the Golden Gate.

5 | 4:41 PM: The wing shears at the foot of the mast, and the boat turns completely upside down.

6 | 6:30 PM: As the sun sets, the sailors accept that they will not be able to pull the boat home against the ebb tide.

7 | 10:00 PM: The tide has finally changed, and rescuers start hauling the upside-down and mostly submerged AC72 back to its home port. They’ll arrive at 1 in the morning.

Mark “Tugboat” Turner arrives in his own speedboat in time to see the Oracle boat slip under the Golden Gate. A barrel-chested tank of a man, Turner has been building boats professionally since leaving school to apprentice as a boatwright at 16, almost 40 years ago. Over the past 16 years, he’s built many for Larry Ellison. After he arrives, he hears the sharp snap of the wing shearing at the foot of the mast, causing the rest of the boat to fall on top of itself, upside down.

Turner watches, helpless, as the submerged wing starts sawing against the main body of the boat. Pieces of the wing break off, to be chased down by the motorboats, but the great mass of it — several jagged pieces — is still connected to the hulls by hydraulic lines and control ropes. Driven by an angry Pacific, the wing and hulls grind together like a mortar and pestle. The pounding continues for the next five hours, as the sailors wait for the tide to turn. By 1 am, with currents finally in their favor, they are able to drag the craft back to Oracle headquarters at Pier 80 on San Francisco’s industrial waterfront — upside down, broken, and almost completely submerged.

While Oracle is in the shed, fixing the smashed boat, the other teams are out practicing. It’s anyone’s race now

It is a disaster. Just repairing the wing will cost well over $1 million (and perhaps as much as $2 million). But the money is the least of it. The real cost is measured in time lost, and not even billionaires can buy more time. It will take nearly four months of 80-hour weeks by a team of 24 staff boatbuilders (plus every odd rigger, sailmaker, and machinist that Turner can manage to shanghai) to fix the damage. And that is just the hulls. The new wing — which needs to be built in a factory in New Zealand — is a job three times as big. The real loss: 40,000 person-hours, or the equivalent of 20 person-years of full-time labor.

That 20 years could have been spent practicing on the bay, engineering subtle mods, and otherwise moving toward the ultimate goal of winning the Cup. At a minimum, the setback has blown Oracle’s lead. Thanks to the win on the wingsailed trimaran in 2010, Oracle entered the contest as the only team with real wingsail experience. To entice the other teams to come out and play, Oracle agreed to limit practice time on the AC72 to a mere 30 days before January 31, 2013. They crashed on the eighth day, forfeiting the other 22. While Oracle is in the shed fixing its AC72, the other teams will be out sailing, perfecting their systems and closing the experience gap. It’s anyone’s race now.

In Sailing, it is traditional for the captain to go down with the ship. And in a postcrash interview, Spithill wastes no time taking the blame. “I am responsible,” he says, his blue eyes flashing. “It was definitely my call.” The problem, as Spithill sees it, was the decision to risk capsizing in high winds, strong current, and high seas. “It’s all good and well to push it and make a mistake, but making the mistake at the exact worst time ever to make it,” he says, noting that the ebb tide was one of the strongest of the year, “that was a bad decision.”

His boss, Russell Coutts, sees other bad calls. It wasn’t just the lousy decision his young protégé made in attempting a run in dangerous conditions. It was all the decisions made after the crash as well. “What we should have done when the boat capsized,” Coutts says, “is tow it into a sheltered area rather than letting it get upwind and under the bridge.” Then it could have been towed to Pier 80 in more forgiving conditions, sparing it most of its damage.

As to where his own responsibilities lie — as Spithill’s mentor, as Team Oracle CEO, as a champion of the AC72 — Coutts is more circumspect. He argues that even though going out for a sail in such conditions was a rookie move, he could not have ordered Spithill to turn around, because overruling a skipper’s decision is tantamount to castration. “I don’t want some wimp driving my boat,” he says. Yet the possibility of someone pushing the boat too hard and capsizing was never addressed in the planning phases. “We never designed it to make sure it doesn’t break, or to make sure that if we had a failure, the damage is minimized,” he admits. “Why?” Coutts says. “The answer is, I don’t know! ”

Coutts’ stance is that this was a freak chain of events that could easily have been avoided and is therefore not a great threat to the America’s Cup writ large. Not everyone agrees. One of the AC72’s most outspoken critics is Scott MacLeod, managing director at WSM Communications, a sports-marketing business, who has represented corporate sponsors in every Cup going back to 1992. “I told them that they had the wrong boat three years ago!” MacLeod says. He founded the World Match Racing Tour, a yacht-racing tournament that was the de facto training ground for the America’s Cup before Ellison decided to abandon traditional monohulls. “I like the new boats, they are cool — but they are too fragile and too costly,” MacLeod says. “And ultimately the numbers don’t add up.”

He’s talking about finances. For the past 25 years, the ratio of truly big money — from billionaires and governments — to corporate dollars in the America’s Cup has hovered at around 50:50. This time around it’s more like 90:10. Most of the corporate money that used to be in the event has fled: The AC72 is just too expensive. “Fifteen million to sponsor a team?” MacLeod exclaims. “Companies can do Nascar for that.” And then there is the risk associated with the new AC72. “What happens if one of these other boats does an Oracle?” MacLeod asks.

It’s a question that the other teams — Luna Rossa, New Zealand, and Artemis — are asking themselves now. Paul Cayard, CEO and tactician of Artemis Racing, has plenty of experience with the tricky conditions in San Francisco Bay. His prediction: At least one of the teams is going to capsize again. “It will be a miracle if we get through the summer without it happening to somebody,” he says. “We’re going to start pushing harder, we are going to race, and those kinds of boats — catamarans — tip over.”

The real unknown, he says, is whether the damage caused by the Oracle crash was, as Coutts argues, an exception, a bad accident compounded by severe tides — or something closer to the norm when an AC72 capsizes in the rough waters of the bay. “The Oracle capsize is a bit of an anomaly,” Cayard says. “But it could happen again.” Oracle and Artemis have a full contingency plan — a second complete boat. New Zealand has just a single complete boat and some spare parts. Prada is the most vulnerable, because it has only one boat. “If Prada did what Oracle did closer to June,” Cayard says, “they’d probably be out of the competition.” A $50 million effort (perhaps more), completely sunk.

The sun shone, and the sailors who were not helping the workers unload the new wing were in the water honing post-capsize rescue and survival techniques. In the back of the hangar, walled off from inquiring eyes by a privacy wall, was the rest of Oracle’s salvaged AC72. Save for a paint job, the repairs were pretty much complete. Not only that, the boat was better than before, with thicker crossbeams and more buoyant bows to help prevent the twist-and-dig action that may have contributed to Spithill’s crash.

The reborn and revitalized Team Oracle is adamant about preventing another catastrophic crash. Brad Webb, the bowman, is on a committee that was preparing a document outlining what to do in the event of a capsize. It started as a one-page memo. “Now we have this massive manual!” he says. Others were working on engineering an airbag that would sit at the very top of the wing and deploy when the tip touched the water. The techniques and ideas will be made available to every team.

If Ellison loses, it’s possible the America’s Cup will have to abandon his skittish, ultrafast catamarans

But the most telling thing I heard while visiting the repair shop came from Coutts, the CEO. I asked him what would happen to the radical new wingsail design after the Cup was over. “No matter who wins,” Coutts said, “they are definitely going to make changes: make the boat smaller, bring the team budgets down, stuff like that.” In other words, the CEO of Team Oracle now acknowledges that the AC72 is an overreach.

It’s one thing to win the Cup, which Ellison did in 2010. (He declined to be interviewed for this article.) But even if he holds on to it by defeating his challengers, Ellison has lost the bigger game. The whole point was to make an indelible mark on the oldest trophy in all of sports. Ellison wanted his Cup to be the biggest, most spectacular sailing event ever. But the 2013 America’s Cup qualifying contest — with only three teams competing — will be the smallest in modern history. The marquee attraction, the giant wingsail catamaran, has proven to be too big even before the first race has been run. If Ellison loses, it’s possible that the next America’s Cup will return to traditional yacht design — monohulls with soft sails — which would be the ultimate refutation of all Team Oracle has tried to do.

For Ellison, the second-richest CEO in the world (after Warren Buffett), the view into the abyss must be hard to fathom. How ironic that he won the Cup as a sailor, crewing in the 2010 race, and then bungled the franchise as a businessman managing the rollout of a new technology. Ultimately, though, Ellison’s story is the story of the Cup: a prize that has always been driven by ego and one-upmanship.

Ellison’s reversal of fortune is a mixed blessing for the average sports fan. If there are a couple of Oracle-size crashes between now and when racing starts this summer, it won’t be much of a playoff series. If two teams manage to pull an Oracle during the races in, say, a messy collision, then there’s a very real chance the series will simply be canceled. On the other hand, now that the AC72’s fatal flaw is obvious to everyone, the possibility of another of these boats turning a somersault raises the stakes to astounding and unprecedented levels. Maybe the big boats will land on their daggerboards and this America’s Cup will glide to its own riveting sort of success. Or maybe Ellison will end up losing the race in every way possible. We’ll find out starting on the Fourth of July.

Adam Fisher ([email protected]) is covering the run-up to the 2013 America’s Cup for wired. You can find his previous stories at www.wired.com/americascup.

Note 1. Correction appended [4:30 PDT/07/11/13:] A number of rules may govern the America’s Cup, not just the box rule.

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ETNZ’s first AC72 catamaran yacht New Zealand wing by Southern Spars completed

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Written by Zuzana Bednarova

The newly-launched Emirates Team New Zealand (ETNZ) AC72 yacht ‘New Zealand’ boasts the impressive 40m carbon fibre wing. This is made up of components supplied by carbon fibre specialists Southern Spars. Sailing yacht New Zealand is a spectacular new class of America’s Cup catamaran.

ETNZ's AC72 catamaran yacht New Zealand sailed for the first time in the Hauraki Gulf on 31st July

Southern Spars has been involved in producing much of the leading edge technology used in America’s Cup yachts since the company was formed in 1989, and as America’s Cup challengers prepare to compete in the 2013 Louis Vuitton Cup , Southern Spars is involved once again.

As Southern Spars’ director Mark Hauser notes, the 34th edition of the America’s Cup is very different to previous events.

“Conventional carbon masts and rigging supporting high-tech sails have been replaced by 40m wing sails for the 2013 AC72 class yachts,” says Hauser. “Working with ETNZ designers, Southern Spars has manufactured 75 per cent of the wing sail components and around 35 per cent of the beam structures for the huge 72’ catamaran.”

ETNZ enlisted the assistance of another Auckland -based company, Cookson Boat Builders, to complete the catamaran.

ETNZ managing director Grant Dalton said at the AC72 New Zealand yacht’s launch party on 21 July that he “hopes the guys at Cookson’s and Southern Spars take the time to reflect on what an achievement they have made”.

The AC72 New Zealand yacht has completed her maiden sail without an issue.

Hauser says: “I was lucky enough to be out on the ETNZ tender during the AC72’s first sail. Although the weather didn’t play ball, it was extremely impressive to see the massive structure in action. It truly is a great testament to the quality of work produced by our team at Southern Spars Custom Projects in New Zealand and it is a very rewarding project to be involved with.”

ETNZ tactician Ray Davies sums up the first sail: “It was a bit of a relief to get out there and fly a hull on the first day. We were doing 20 knots in 10 knots of breeze.”

“With an extremely skilled production and manufacturing team, Southern Spars has successfully adapted to designing and manufacturing the new wing sails,” says Hauser. “Southern Spars is currently well-advanced with the wing sail production and are in the final stages of completing work on Luna Rossa Challenges first AC72 wing. We have the capability to build multiple AC72 wings in our Auckland facility. The wing masts are designed specifically for ease of shipment and New Zealand has direct shipping links to San Francisco where the 2013 Louis Vuitton Cup and America’s Cup will be sailed.”

With both ETNZ and Luna Rossa Challenge running two-wing programmes, Southern Spars will also be involved in the production of each team’s second AC72 yacht.

Please contact CharterWorld - the luxury yacht charter specialist - for more on superyacht news item "ETNZ’s first AC72 catamaran yacht New Zealand wing by Southern Spars completed".

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The AC72 Catamaran

The 72 foot long catamarans that will be competing for the America’s Cup  in San Francisco in 2013 are both breathtakingly beautiful and slightly terrifying.  Powered by a towering wing sail and well capable of sailing at the twice the speed of the wind, these high-tech monsters suggest the still untapped potential of sail.  A 3d animated fly-around of the AC72 :

The 34th America’s Cup AC72 class rule 3D animation flyaround

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RACE.FLY.LIVE EXPERIENCE THE GC32 CATAMARAN

• SPECIFICATIONS
• 12.00m Length (overall)
• 10.00m Length (hull)
• 6.00m Width
• 2.10m Max Board Draft
• 1.60m Max Rudder Draft
• 16.50m Mast Height (above beam)
• 6.60m Bow Sprit Length
• 975kg Total Boat Weight
• 55.30m2 3DI Raw Northsail Mainsail
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Moscow Mule

Liquor.com has been serving drinks enthusiasts and industry professionals since 2009. Our writers are some of the most respected in the industry, and our recipes are contributed by bartenders who form a veritable "Who's Who" of the cocktail world.

The Moscow Mule is a classic combination of vodka, ginger beer, and lime. Known for it's iconic copper mug, the drink's enduring popularity has left it as a mainstay in bars since the mid-20th century. Despite its name, the Moscow Mule was actually invented in Los Angeles as part of an early stateside marketing push for vodka, and the drink itself is considered an example of the Buck family of drinks—those that include a spirit with citrus and ginger beer.

The History of the Moscow Mule

The Moscow Mule is a mid-century classic that was born in 1941 and helped contribute to vodka’s rise in America. As the legend goes , it was concocted by two men. John Martin needed to sell Smirnoff vodka, a new and generally unknown spirit during the middle of the 20th century that his distribution company had recently purchased. Another man, bar owner Jack Morgan, wanted to deplete the stash of ginger beer taking up space at his Cock ‘n’ Bull pub. They decided to combine the two ingredients with a little lime, and the rest is history. (Though there is a conflicting origin story that says that a bartender by the name of Wes Price was the true originator of the cocktail’s recipe.)

The origin of the Moscow Mule mug is slightly less clear, though evidence points to the connection originating with a Russian woman named Sophie Berezinski, who's father owned copper factory called Moscow Copper Co. Allegedly, poor sales in their home country left the younger Berezinski to travel to the U.S. to find new buyers.

As historian David Wondrich observes, the copper mugs reached Cock 'n' Bull and were used to create a visually distinct presentation for the new cocktail, helped along by Martin who took Polaroid instant photos (then a recent invention) of Los Angeles bartenders and guests holding the copper mugs alongside bottles of Smirnoff. The photos were displayed throughout the bar and given to patrons to share, almost in the same vein as modern social media influencers. As the photos proliferated throughout the Los Angeles cocktail community, it helped to spur demand for the novel drink.

Regardless of how the drink was invented, the easygoing combination of vodka, spicy ginger and tart lime—all packaged neatly in an eye-catching mug—was a hit. More than a quarter century later, the Moscow Mule remains a star. It has even spawned variations, like the Mezcal Mule with mezcal and the Kentucky Mule with bourbon.

Why the Moscow Mule Works

The simple cocktail combines vodka with ginger beer and fresh lime juice. It’s a no-tools-required drink that is built right in that shiny copper mug. Of course, while said mug is always preferred for serving, it’s not essential and shouldn’t deter you from making a Moscow Mule. The drink tastes great no matter the receptacle. So if a highball glass or rocks glass is all you have on hand, don’t fret.

Any preferred vodka will work nicely in the mule, but high-quality ginger beer is a must. You want a top-notch option that and offers enough of a spicy bite to complement the liquor and lime. And keep that bottle cold before you employ it your Moscow Mule. Cold keeps the bubbles brisk and helps stall dilution when you mix all the drink’s ingredients.

This recipe brings the legendary drink up to date while remaining true to its refreshing roots. At its core, the Moscow Mule is deceptively simple and incredibly easy to mix, perfect for any season.

Liquor.com / Tim Nusog

Ingredients

2 ounces vodka

1/2 ounce lime juice , freshly squeezed

3 ounces ginger beer , chilled

Garnish: lime wheel

Fill a Moscow Mule mug (or highball glass) with ice, then add the vodka and lime juice.

Top with the ginger beer.

Garnish with a lime wheel.

What If I Don’t Have a Copper Mug?

No doubt about it: The textured copper mug is a gorgeous part of a classic Moscow Mule. Truth is, it’s less the copper that matters than the conductivity of copper as a type of metal. So, blasphemous as it may appear, a Julep cup—or any other metal container—is a delightful substitute. Because you’ll still get that frosty, deeply cold result.