Team New Zealand CEO Grant Dalton told Newhub’s Tom McRae . . . “On the face of it, it looks normalish. But once it starts to roll, once it starts to get up on the foils it won’t look like a boat, it will look like an aircraft.”
Team New Zealand will be the first to launch it’s AC75 – the new 23-metre foiling monohull that will replace the catamaran’s that were used in Bermuda for the last America’s Cup – this Friday 6 September.
Dalton believes that the work the design team has spent months working on behind closed doors will be decisive to their chances of retaining the Auld Mug.
While the teams are expected to build a second version that will do the racing in Auckland in 2021, most of the major design decisions have already been made meaning, 18 months out, the winner could already be decided.
Dalton continued . . . “The America’s Cup is actually over, we just don’t know who won yet because decisions you make very early set the pattern of what will happen two, three years in time.”
“Once that boat rolls out of the shed it won’t even get halfway out before it’s already in Europe and the United States.” he said, refering to the rival team spies already gathering for the launch later this week in Auckland.
“I think in terms of the energy that each of the teams is bringing to it, the intensity … I don’t think I have seen that before.”
“The English, they just say nothing, they are quietly going about it and that is a worry.”
In a recent interview the Head of Design at INEOS TeamUK, Nick Holroyd, a previous winner of the Cup with Emirates Team New Zealand in Auckland in 2000, had a different take on the development likely between the first and second boats . . .
The class rule came out 1st of April last year and we have signed off the lines of this boat (code named ‘RB1’) in September so four and a half months of development work was necessarily somewhat quick and dirty in that process.
We have had another nine or 10 months of improving our tools and getting the data we require. Race boat two will be more than just a refinement of boat one.
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