- INEOS Britannia’s new Chief Designer Martin Fischer claims there is plenty of room for improvement.
It is Dr Martin Fischer who will be ultimately responsible for the design concept of the British team’s new AC75 for the 37th America’s Cup.
And he upped the ante from day one with his claim that there was ‘plenty of room for improvement’ in the second generation AC75 design.
INEOS Britannia, backed by billionaire Jim Ratcliffe, has made sweeping changes to the design team, making use of Ratcliffe’s involvement with the Mercedes-AMG Petronas F1 Team. A move that has kicked-off an arms race for other AC teams to join with Formula 1 teams.
Alinghi founder Ernesto Bertarelli has partnered his Swiss AC team with Red Bull Racing, and rumours swirl that the Luna Rossa Challenge Team will also announce an F1 alliance soon.
The organisation and co-ordination of INEOS Britannia’s design team is now led by James Allison and Geoff Willis, both of whom have come from the Mercedes-AMG Petronas F1 Team.
Fischer has joined from the Italian Challenger Luna Rossa where he has spent the last two America’s Cup campaigns, to lead the design concept for INEOS Britannia’s 37th America’s Cup campaign.
Fischer, “Yes, my role is Chief Designer, but that does not mean I am designing the whole thing!”, he hastens to add. “It means after discussions with the entire team, it is my responsibility to determine the direction in which we want to go.”
He continued . . .“There is plenty of room for improvement, there’s lots of work to do and it’s a huge challenge, but now in this second cycle we can start from where we stopped last time and improve it even further.”
Just where exactly those gains can be made is a secret Fischer is not willing to share quite yet.
But the continued design failures of Britain’s America’s Cup challengers would seem to indicate that he could be working from a relatively clean sheet.
“I won’t tell you where I think we can make the biggest gains because that’s our work for the next three years!”
However, he added . . . “All I will say is I think every single piece on the boat can be improved and we will work our hardest over the coming years to improve every aspect of it”.
Which is a pretty damning indictment of the previous INEOS challenger, but follows a long history of high anticipation and crushing reality.
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