Nathan Outteridge and Dean Barker entered the day in very different positions; the former facing the very real prospect of his Artemis Racing team facing elimination from the 35th America’s Cup and the latter standing on the verge of his SoftBank Team Japan making history for Japan by seeing a Japanese team reach the Louis Vuitton America’s Cup Challenger Playoffs Finals for the first time ever.

However, facing a 3-1 deficit following back-to-back defeats on Tuesday, Nathan Outteridge and Artemis Racing mounted an almighty comeback against their Japanese rivals, Dean Barker’s SoftBank Team Japan, winning three races on the trot to take the score in their Louis Vuitton America’s Cup Challenger Playoffs Semi-Finals to 4-3. That scoreline means the two teams will race again on Friday to decide the second Finalist.

“It was an awesome day for us and I’m incredibly proud of everybody involved in our team,” said Artemis Racing helmsman Nathan Outteridge.

“We had an incredibly tough day on Tuesday and so as a team we looked back at what we had to do better. I think everyone saw not only an improved boat but a much needed improved performance from us as sailors.

“We were not particularly nervous heading into today. We know it could have been our potential exit today but we were all quietly confident.

“We could have lost confidence in the boat after Tuesday but everyone dug in deep and I’m just proud of what we achieved today.

“We went back to basics and it just showed how easy it can be to win races again.The aim is to do the same tomorrow and take another step towards winning the America’s Cup.”

In reply, SoftBank Team Japan’s Dean Barker is refusing to concede defeat.

“It was obviously a very disappointing day but everyone is remaining positive,” said a determined Barker.

“It’s never ideal to lose three races in a day and it is frustrating for everyone but we take a lot of heart from today into tomorrow.

“Small errors cost us today but we know we are still right in this contest and it will not take a lot to go out and win tomorrow.

“We are two very even teams and although we had a disappointing day, we will take all of our positive energy into tomorrow.”

Ahead of their first duel of the day, Nathan Outteridge knew that a repeat of Tuesday’s two defeats to SoftBank Team Japan would see them eliminated from the 35th America’s Cup.

However, it was SoftBank Team Japan who, despite leading their Semi-Final 3-1, showed early nerves in the two teams’ first encounter of the day as the Japanese team were handed a penalty for crossing the start line a fraction too soon.

That mistake handed Nathan Outteridge the advantage and it was one he took full advantage of, taking the lead and staying ahead throughout the entire race.

SoftBank Team Japan remained in hot pursuit of their rivals but there was ultimately nothing they could do. A faultless performance from Outteridge and Artemis Racing saw the Swedish team seal a 39 second victory and reduce the deficit in their fight to stay in the 35th America’s Cup to 3-2.

Artemis Racing then built on that opening victory and levelled the scores against SoftBank Team Japan with a second successive victory.

Just as they had in the two teams’ opening encounter on Thursday, Artemis Racing timed their approach to the start line to perfection and took an early lead.

In stark contrast to Tuesday’s poor performance, Nathan Outteridge and his team looked assured throughout the race, maintaining a slender lead over the pursuing SoftBank Team Japan.

While Barker sailed an almost faultless race, Artemis Racing did not make the mistake the Japanese team would have been hoping for and Nathan Outteridge steered his team home with a 28 second victory, levelling the scores at 3-3 ahead of the teams’ third and final battle of the day.

Having won both of the day’s previous battles, Nathan Outteridge made it a hat-trick of victories in the last race of the day, turning a 3-1 deficit at the start of Thursday into a 4-3 lead at the end of the day.

Dean Barker narrowly won the pre-start battle, SoftBank Team Japan stealing an early march over Nathan Outteridge’s Artemis Racing. However, the Swedish team battled back over the first four legs of the race and closed the gap completely heading into the pivotal and dramatic Gate 5 turn.

The two teams came into the mark and, in a dramatic flashpoint moment, almost touched, the result of which was a penalty handed to SoftBank Team Japan.

It was a decision from the America’s Cup Race Management umpires that was to prove critical as Artemis Racing seized the advantage to race clear and cross the finish line well ahead of their rivals, sealing a third consecutive victory on the day.

That result leaves Nathan Outteridge in the driving seat heading into a mouth-watering day of racing on Friday, with Artemis Racing needing one more win and SoftBank Team Japan needing two more wins to confirm their place in the Louis Vuitton America’s Cup Challenger Playoffs Finals, where either team will face Peter Burling’s Emirates Team New Zealand.

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The variables to consider today as the boats take flight are innumerable, says Nick Holroyd, lead designer and technical director with SoftBank Team Japan. Holroyd, a mechanical engineer by trade, has been involved with the Cup for nearly two decades. “The level of complexity and the subtleties are endless,” he says of the new AC50. “In that sense, they’re rewarding of time on the water, because the permutations of how you can set up the foils and the wing are huge.”

First things first: The foils, what do we need to know?

Unlike with the previous Cup, the systems are now very interconnected. When we started down the road with the foiling AC72s, we didn’t really know how to control the boats, so we found a shape solution for the boards that had a lot of inherent stability. With the 72s, the forces were really big, so we had relatively low power, which we still have, but we’re far more sophisticated now with how we use it.

In general, in sailing, whether on a monohull or whatever, anytime you’re generating lift off a keel, you have induced drag. That’s energy lost in the system, and the source of that drag is because you’re generating lift. In the early stages of designing these foils, we were designing where we had this sort of excess of lift and using those to balance out each other. Why I start with that is because that’s where you start feeding into control systems. Now we look at the global stability of the boat, and that ­stability includes the helmsman’s reaction time, and time for the hydraulics to actually move the board, plus the actual stability of the foil itself. As we work our way down that path, we find we can design boards that are negatively stable because the systems are good enough so the ­helmsman’s reactions are way better than they were with the AC72.

What do you mean by negative stability?

As in, when you take one of our modern foils and disturb it from ­equilibrium, the tendency is for it to accelerate away from the equilibrium, without the correction. Whereas before, we had a foil, we disturbed it, and it wanted to pull itself back toward its equilibrium point. Now we have a foil that when you disturb it, it wants to fire the boat out of the water, so without that correction movement in the control system, you have negative stability.

The beauty is we are generating a lot less lift overall, so we are not creating this excess of lift to create the balance point. We are generating just enough to lift the boat up (which weighs roughly 3 tons with all the guys on board) and about a ton of side force from the wing. So now we have boards that are very much L-shaped, and the forces are not fighting each other anymore. As a result, the foils have much less induced drag, and the spans of the foils compared with the 72s are much shorter.

So what’s that done for us? We’ve gone from having boats that only foil downwind — the takeoff speed in the 72s was 20-plus knots — to boats that foil upwind in pretty modest amounts of breeze. Take off is in the midteens. It’s been a drive to efficiency, and the system part of that is coupled into what we’ve been able to achieve.

So how efficient are today’s foils?

The drag you get when creating lift is much more pronounced at low speeds. For example, if I have a certain span, I have water going past that foil at quite low speed. I have to deflect the hell out of it to generate enough momentum into the water to lift the boat. You see that at low speeds — you can see a really defined wave trough behind the foil where it really presses the water surface. At high speed, what I have is tons of water flowing over the foil, and I have to deflect it only a small amount, so what we’ll see evolve is quite specialized foils. This is because the balance where the drag comes from changes significantly through the speed range. Your high-speed boards are skinny, short-span ­toothpicky-type boards.

What’s been interesting about this is we have to target a boat to win in certain conditions, but this time especially it’s not as predictable. We have to design a much more general-purpose platform. In 6 knots, it might be two hulls in the water and running square downwind, but that’s a design condition for us to consider. With another half-knot of breeze and we can get one hull to fly, and then with another half-knot or so we’re foiling downwind. Then another knot and we’re foiling upwind. So we have to design a foil that will take us from 6 knots on up. The way the physics of sailing the boat across the range changes is remarkable.

And what about at the top end of the wind range, 20-plus knots?

At the high-end, we have water boiling around the foils. The foil geometry becomes dictated by that, but we also need something that performs well in a straight line at high speed. The core need is stability. We’ll see some boats that are really in control and maybe not so fast. There will be others that show flashes of being blindingly quick but can’t be controlled very well, which is why the helmsman’s response times and the amount of power/watts you can put into the hydraulic actuators to move the boards around is big part of it all.

About those control systems, what can you share?

This time around we are allowed specifically for appendage rake, so we can use more-modern control systems where we can measure a position. The helmsman sets a command that he wants the board at “X,” and we have a displacement transducer or whatever that measures the board position and a little computer that says the board is currently at X, plus or minus whatever. We can get very fast time-to-targets, and then we can have the computer drive the board to that target. In San Francisco, we were pressing a button that said open the valve for .03 of a second and see what happens. The problem is that if you do that at 20 knots, it’s a different result than at 40 knots, so the boats were hard to sail because of that. We are in the modern world of control systems, but we’re a still a long way away. It’s been a fun science project. But one of the things that is making our lives easier is that we now have hydraulic accumulators: nitrogen-charged gas chambers that we can pump up to the relative pressure of a dive tank. When you see the guys winding the handles, a lot of what they’re doing is recharging the accumulators. We are using hydraulic power from those accumulators to control rake, boards up and down, and many other things.

The other advantage of working through an accumulator is that it can deliver about 400 watts over a sustained period of time. If you have a guy winding the handles, you can have oil delivered at 400 watts, which is many cubic centimeters per minute at any given pressure. If he’s pre-done all that work and put it into the accumulator, you can open a valve and instantaneously have much higher pressure coming out, so you can move boards much faster than operating them directly from the pump.

The efficiency of these systems, however, is in the many components, right?

Yes. We’re trying to achieve very fine levels of control with ­minimum power. There have been advances right down to the very fine mechanical engineering of valves and stuff; the custom in this industry is huge. I’d guess there are maybe 30 or 50 valves spread across the platforms, and that’s not including check valves and all the ­pressure-relief valves.

ORACLE Team USA reveal their ACC boat at the team base in Bermuda.

Given how much the aerospace industry already knows about foil shapes, how is it that the foil packages that are so closely guarded by the teams could be so different at the end day?

There are a couple of reasons. One is the dependency on the control systems: How much stability can I pull out of the foil, and how much do I rely on the control systems? That’s the number-one driver and dictates the different way the boats are being sailed. In terms of how people end up with different things, your choices in how you think the game will be played out at a tactical level. The last Cup started where we were ­foiling downwind, and that’s where the game was going to be won and lost. Then in the end, it was all won upwind. So where on the course are we trying to get our performance? Maneuvers, for example, how we are prepared to trade away straight-line speed for a board that is more forgiving through a lot of maneuvering.

We now have foils that are really quite unstable, so they have to be actively managed throughout every maneuver, and you have all these challenges: You first have to get the foil down, and when you first drop it into the water, you want no lift on it, so you actually drive it down to full extension to get it into the water. At some point, as the boat changes from one jibe or tack to the other, you essentially have the roll moment on the rig, which is going to change one side to the other. The weight will come off one foil and onto the other, so you’re going to have to manipulate both foils, because if you leave the one where the weight is coming off it and you don’t reduce the angle of attack on it, the foil will just keep producing the same amount of lift until it fires that side of the boat up into the air. So the decisions around the relative importance of maneuvering versus straight-line sailing is all that can drive different-looking foils.

There’s a lot happening through the turns than meets the eye, isn’t there?

Oh, yes. The lift you generate on the foil is proportional to the speed, so the first thing that is going to happen is you lose drive force at some point through the turn. You might be going into a jibe close to 40 knots, and your bottom speed might be 28, and you have to come out and accelerate. So to deal with that lift on the foil, you’re going to need to alter the angle of attack on it. As the rig loses its drive force in the middle of the maneuver — the drive force in the rig basically pushes the bow down, so the back of the boat is effectively heavier — you have to do something with the rudders to try to keep the pitch of the boat reasonably level. That means, in general, increasing rake on the boards to keep the boat up so it’s level. Then you’re having to increase rake on the ­rudders to keep the front of the boat up.

The third piece is the rig roll moment being in one direction; there’s suddenly lift on one side of the boat. Until the rig pops through, the roll moment is in the opposite direction, so you have to transfer all the lift from one daggerboard to the other. At that point, you start accelerating again, and then have to change the rudder rake again. You now have excess drive force, and the bows are being pushed down really hard. Typically, the helmsman will manage one board and the rudders, and one of the crew will manage the new board until the helmsman gets across and takes flight control back.

So through a jibe, for example, the helmsman steers down and starts to feel the roll moment. The power comes out of the rig as the apparent wind goes forward. The bit that makes it quite difficult is that when the new board drops into the water, the physics are unpredictable; depending on how hard it hits the surface. For example, if you’re high flying, the board hits the water with a lot of momentum, and quite often with a big splash. Once that happens, you’ve blown all the water away, and as the board goes deeper, the water sort of folds in over the top, and you get this bubble attached to the foil that gets carried down. The board then can’t generate any lift until that bubble washes away. It’s a fraction of second, and while sometimes it will go in nice and clean and hook up right away, there’s this moment of trying to figure out what it’s going to do.

The wing basically needs camber to be generation power, so we drive the camber through from one side to the other. Again, you want to be able to control the roll moment as it’s going from one side to the other, so the other thing that happens — and it sounds weird, and it’s more pronounced in the tacks than the jibes — is that one side of the boat is going about 3 knots faster than the other. You have one foil generating twice as much vertical force as the other one. When you see them do it well, it just happens, but when you try to step back and consider the physics and all the variables, it’s really impressive to see them do it.

When you watch them on the water, you can see whether it’s going to be a good jibe just by how well they keep the stability going into it. If they get a little bit off-balance, it really compounds. The boat gets a little unstable, too much heel on or whatever, and with that you get a little bow-down pitch. Suddenly, the [pre-set] angle of attack is off, and the foil wants to suck down really hard. You have to get it down and get a quick rake correction before the turn.

OK, enough on the foils. How about the wing?

The complexity in the wing design is that we have a system of cables and hydraulics to control the twist of the three flaps going up the wing. We have four control stations — one at the bottom and three above that — so we can sort of bend the wing into the shape we want. The complexity is when you twist a flap, a certain amount of the aerodynamic force is carried by the structure inside the flap. It takes a force to twist it, so you can choose to build that structure torsional rigidity and the flap will take a lot of the load. There’s a wide range of shapes, so what gets hard is to build control systems that give you control over all those shapes and lets you do that with relatively low power across the full range, from light air where we have the whole thing fully wicked up all the way up the wing, to heavy air where in up-range we can actually invert the lift on the top of the sail where we can keep twisting it until the head of the rig is lifting to windward.

With a multihull, the point at which the windward hull lifts off is the point at which you have maximum righting moment. We can do that in 6 knots of wind. As the breeze gets stronger, I have to move my center of effort closer and closer down to the platform. With a conventional soft sail rig we can move the center of effort down to about 15 percent of the rig height, twisting it until I generate a roll moment in the opposite direction at the head. On these boats, we can get it down to about 10 percent of the rig height, which is essentially using only the bottom panel. We still have the same roll moment, but we’ve halved the moment arm that wants to tip the boat, and still have four times the drive force. That’s why the boats keep going faster and faster down the course. In terms of wing design, the complexity is how to get a control system that is efficient and low-powered, but the loads of the control system are dictated by the structural choices I make in the wing. It’s a complicated piece of engineering. I’d rather build a board that’s 10 percent less stable, and use that power to control the board position more accurately and faster.

What about canting the boards inboard and outboard? At what point does this come into play?

There’s a trade-off with that. The board can’t go outside the beam, by rule. The more you move them outboard toward the max beam, the more righting moment you get. The force you’re using to lift the boat out of the water is getting farther out toward max beam, farther away from your center of gravity, so you have more roll moment. The price you pay is generally the foils become less and less stable as you go outboard. In flat-water moderate conditions, we can sail the boat at maximum power, so board canting is a way of dialing in the limit of stability. There might be times when the boat is flat out of oil, so you might choose to sail the boat a little bit slower but make my life easier while you generate some oil pressure, and you can do that with slightly less cant; you can be a knot slow, but you can reduce the amount of power that’s going to the wing sheet to make the boat easier to sail and catch up on some oil.

The third area of exploitation is the aerodynamics of the boat. Very subtle stuff here, it seems.

Some teams have chosen to put more area in the front beam versus the back beam. When you look down on top of the boat, you’re allowed 33 square meters of projected area, so your design optimization is how to best spend that and put it various places. In terms of the distribution, it comes back to how you set up the wing, to some degree. The front beam acts like the wing tip you’d see on an aircraft rudder; it has an end-plate effect where it helps smooth out the induced drag vortex you get off the bottom of the wing. Higher up the wind range, where the bottom of the wing is loaded really hard, you tend to get a strong vortex off the bottom of the wing, so if you’re designing into that area of the wind range, you’d distribute your area into the front beam. For lighter air, where lift is distributed across the length of the wing, you’d probably start to spread that area around a little more and look to minimize the drag off the ­crossbeams and so on.

The post The Tech Behind the America’s Cup appeared first on Sailing World.

Dean Barker is dressed head to toe in tight black sailing gear, his scarred white helmet tucked under his right arm. As he gazes across Bermuda’s Great Sound, painted by the orange hues of a winter sunset, he gnaws at an apple in his left hand. The shore team hustles to crane the 50-foot catamaran Hikari from the water and place it into its cradle before dark. They’ve seized upon a late-afternoon breeze to take the boat for its second break-in, which amounts to a ­90-minute systems check.

Off in the distance, Land Rover BAR’s crane is idle, the base deserted; the British challengers had pulled the plug earlier after waiting all afternoon for wind. But Barker and his teammates don’t have such a luxury. The clock ticks, and the very competition that trampled his spirit is now fewer than 100 days out. It’s already late February, and while the winds on Great Sound have barely touched 5 knots, every minute on the water will count for something come June.

The 6-foot-4-inch and steely-eyed 44-year-old Barker is one of the most complex and curious characters of the modern America’s Cup. He’s a thick-skinned New Zealander to the core: guarded, pensive and loyal to a fault. His sixth America’s Cup is looming, and while he appears relaxed after the short sailing session on the new boat, the burden upon on his broad shoulders is real. For it was not long ago, in San Francisco in 2013, when Barker, at the helm of an Emirates Team New Zealand’s AC72, found himself on the receiving end of Oracle Team USA’s comeback shocker. Barker — stoic and gracious in defeat at the time — stood proudly with his mates, but critics back home gave it to him on the chin.

His subsequent divorce from ­Emirates Team New Zealand after nearly 20 years was inevitable. The parting was messy, but as one door closed in Auckland, the next opened in Tokyo, at threshold of Masayoshi Son, the billionaire founder and head of SoftBank, an international telecommunications company that’s worth a reported $67 billion.

Son, says Kazuhiko Sofuku, the team’s general manager, was intrigued with the Cup. “He has same philosophy,” says Sofuku. “He likes fast, being number one, and having something that’s challenging. From Japan he is challenging the world, and that is what we are doing.” At the outset of the campaign, says Sofuku, Barker brought over good people with him. “Everyone follows Dean, and the respect they have [for] each other is amazing: It’s attitude and professional,” he says. “We are a team from Japan, and the guys respect our culture, to work hard and be polite. Like Mr. Son did with his business: He started small, and so we are too.”

A flip chart on an easel in the cafeteria reminds the sailors as much: “50=»80” it reads. “50 on the boat…Mateship…Respect for each other.” When I ask what it means, Sofuku says, “We must do with a team of 50 what others do with 80.”

The face of this small and nimble team, of course, is Barker, who I’m told is highly regarded in Cup circles for his ability to delegate and move swiftly with critical decisions, a trait appreciated by the team’s lead designer, Nick Holyrod, another Team New ­Zealand alumnus. Holyrod is credited with ­masterminding ETNZ’s foiling 72-footer, which led America’s Cup into its current state of foilers. As far as design-team draft picks, Holyrod is first round. Barker wanted him on his team, as he did longtime teammate Jeremy Lomas, another New Zealander and sage Cup veteran. Lomas was right there beside Barker when ETNZ went down in flames in San Francisco, and three years later, the loss still burns.

“It’s too easy to look back at it and put [the loss] to the races where we were ahead when the races got blown off,” he says. “We arrived sailing the boat at about 90 percent, where Oracle turned up at 50. They kept evolving, and we were tapped out.”

Parting ways with his closest mates and following Barker out the door wasn’t easy, he says, and still weighs on him today. “One of the things I’ll have to deal with is what if Team New Zealand wins …. And that’s still a reality.”

Yet, he has no regrets. For today’s Cup sailor, a job is a job, and for Lomas and several others on the team, Barker was a known variable in an event with so many unknowns. “Dean was the ­biggest motivator in making my decision,” says Lomas. “I had a lot of sleepless nights, but it’s nice to be ­sitting in this position now.”

Other veteran ETNZ defectors — on the sailing team alone — include Derek Saward and Winston Macfarlane. Alongside a few Australian and Japanese sailors, the odd man in the lineup, the one with the British passport is 37-year-old Chris Draper, who helmed Luna Rossa’s AC72 in 2013 and is now SoftBank’s onboard strategist.

While the rest of the guys are ­slaving over their grinding pedestals, Draper is Barker’s co-pilot, his eyes outside the boat. Their dynamic is new and evolving, but he’s happy and ­learning to follow Barker’s lead.

“Dean’s experience in San Francisco has certainly left him with memories,” says Draper, “but I’ve watched that race many times since, and I remember watching Dean’s speech after the Cup. It was unbelievable …. How ­anyone can do that is beyond me.”

Not one person on the shore team or the sailing team doubts Barker’s ability to excel under pressure, says Draper. “The closer it gets to the America’s Cup happening, the more we’re seeing that from him. Everyone senses it here. For sure, he’s going to want to right some wrongs.”

When Draper considers mistakes made during the 2016 America’s Cup World Series events — they finished fifth overall — he contributes them to simple communication breakdowns. “That’s the stuff we’re trying to refine,” he says. “We all know Dean can go and win any boat race, and I am capable of making the decision he requires to win sailboat races.”

With Barker preoccupied with ­flying the 3-ton boat on its foils, he has precious little time and space to consider tactics or his distance to the ­racecourse’s virtual boundary. For this, he relies on Draper. “It’s really hard to make good decisions when you’re making the boat go fast,” he says, “so we’re finding ways to find that ­balance, as are the other teams.”

The faster the racing, the more important situational awareness and muscle memory are, says Holyrod. In this regard, Barker’s experience behind the wheel of an AC boat is not to be underestimated. “He’s been racing at this level for so long,” says Holyrod, who sailed against him as a crew on Team New Zealand’s B boat in Valencia. “He understands how maneuvers will unfold, the timing of them, and what he needs to do to make it work. His ability to process the bigger picture of what’s happening on the boat is remarkable.”

What’s also remarkable, says Draper, is Barker’s ability to lead by example and do more with less. “We have one guy doing what perhaps eight others are doing on another team. They might work until bloody 12 o’clock at night, but they’re doing it. We have only 50 people, and we’re going against teams with triple that.”

That human resource figure, however, is slightly misleading because early on in the campaign, SoftBank worked closely with Oracle Team USA, their surrogate and neighbor in Bermuda through a ­design-package sharing arrangement. The two bases are separated by an unlocked chain-link gate, and they freely pass through each other’s bases and cafeterias. They trained alongside each other all winter long, bound by rules to not share performance data.

As the Louis Vuitton America’s Cup Qualifier races approach, however, they’re keen to draw the divide. “Under no uncertain terms are we the same team as Oracle Team USA,” says Draper. “Every decision we make is for the benefit of our team. Without the support we’ve had from them, there’s no way we’d be competitive, but we’re a small-budget team. I don’t think what we do on the water here in ­Bermuda reflects us as such.”

Indeed, they’ve laid a few big ­milestones along the way, claiming to be the first team to complete a foiling tack on the foiling AC45s used for training and development. “That first foiling tack was a case of luck,” Draper confesses. “Oracle was already pretty close to tacking on the foils, but we just happened to beat them to it. They went out a few days later and spent the whole day trying to do one.”

The foiling tack was a shot of confidence in their program. Draper attributes it to being able to move forward with their development while their more cumbersome competitors muddle through the weeds. “I was talking with one of the other guys when we were full of piss at a party, and he was like, ‘One of the things you’ve got is that you don’t have all the f—ing noise. You don’t have the baggage,’” he says. “It’s true, though. We’ll go into a meeting, and in an hour make a bloody big decision.”

Draper puts his faith in Barker to deliver come race time, and he’s also excited to have had Holyrod lead the design team. “He knows how everything works and the engineering of it. He’s not our only designer, but not far off,” says Draper. “He’s highly capable in all areas: rudders, daggerboards, pump — anything — but the one big thing is the foils. It’s a huge part of what this is all about: control systems, foils and wing controls. There’s so much going on, you’re always nearly within one button press of a crash. There is plenty to go wrong.”

With the demand for precision flight control, continually adjusting the three-dimensional movements of the dagger foils, rudders and wing, there’s an absolute demand on efficient hydraulic control systems, the inner workings of which are closely guarded by all teams. The AC50’s magic is hidden in the hulls: a web of pumps, valves, circuits and tubes that deliver power to ­adjustments throughout the boat.

“If you can sail around the course and always have as much oil as you need to accomplish any maneuver any time,” explains Draper, “you’re going to be so strategically powerful, and that’s why we’re all pushing to the absolute end to fine-tune the control systems. If one guy is able to do three tacks back to back, it’s going to be easy to be able to get a split and get away. Control systems are everything.”

With precision hydraulics, there’s a push toward faster but unstable foils, which places a greater burden on the sailors to maintain consistent flight and maneuverability. When the boat is sailing in a straight line, Barker controls the flight of the boat more than one would realize, says Draper. That means constantly adjusting the foil’s rake while compensating for instantaneous changes in wind strength, crew weight movement, and unpredictable nuances common to sailing.

It’s a skill that requires a hard-wired brain such as Barker’s, and with Holyrod as an ace in hand, SoftBank Team Japan’s storyline in June could very well be a David and Goliath match between the two foes-turned allies. “It would be serious egg on their face if we do beat them,” says Draper. “Imagine the conversation between Dean and Jimmy if we were up on them going into the final race, given what happened last time. That would be absolute gold.” Redemption is a powerful motivator, and while that’s true for both Barker and Emirates Team New Zealand, what makes it different for Barker is that it’s personal. His small posse of loyalists has his back, but should he live to race again, he must fire the first shot, and it had better be on target.

The post SoftBank Team Japan: Into the Light appeared first on Sailing World.

The battle that is the America’s Cup may start in 52 days, but make no mistake; the war of the foils has been raging for years.

As teams begin to line up with their America’s Cup Class race yachts in Bermuda, the dagger board shapes deployed are coming under increased scrutiny – what may look like similar designs to an untrained eye, actually yield multitudes of differences when matched against one another.

You might say Nick Holroyd, Technical Director for SoftBank Team Japan – who led the design of the first foiling America’s Cup yacht four years ago – has some expertise in this field and took the time to share his perspective on what he’s been seeing in the daily recon reports.

“How are they spending their allocation strategically? That’s what I’m asking”, said Holroyd.

“Can you perceive from their designs that they’re an upwind, downwind, or a maneuvering boat – where do they see the race being won? Once you’ve picked that strategic approach then you can look at the details of how they got there.

“For sure we’re seeing a real split in the fleet in terms of the stability that’s inherently designed into the boards. That may well reflect how far advanced those teams are with their control systems. The overall stability is the inherent stability in the board plus the quality of control system – how fast you can get boards to target – plus how good the human interface is for the helmsman.”

Yet wrapped in the stability equation, Holroyd is keenly watching for board failures on other teams as he dissects the structural engineering that other designers have gambled on in an effort to solve as many of the performance tradeoffs as possible.

“To make these boats efficient you’re forced into making some extreme structures”, said Holroyd.

“There’s an incentive in light air boards to have a lot of span – which is structurally difficult – and for heavy air boards you’re trying to design them to not cavitate, and that’s also structurally difficult.”

Asked how a team might fair if they had broken a foil during practice at this point in the competition, he was quick to assert that the time to build a new dagger board has long since passed.

“You’re well inside the timeframe to built a new board in time so if you have a major structural issue at this point that warrants ‘open heart surgery’, that can take you off the water for 3-4 weeks. These patients take a while to recover.

“If you were having structural issues in your boards at this stage of your campaign you would be nervous.”

As for the question of whether the Cup will be decided by foil design or control systems, Holroyd explained it’s still a game that’s decided by a multitude of factors.

“In the America’s Cup you’ve always had a whole bunch of things you’ve got to do right – you’ve got to raise the money, get the team going, sail well, have a fast boat, be reliable, have good meteorology – and frankly screwing up any one of those things could loose you the race. You have to have the complete package.”

The post The Battle of the Foils appeared first on Sailing World.

All are safe after a broken wing appendage onboard SoftBank Team Japan’s AC45 Sport ended testing yesterday as the sailors pushed the upper wind limit of the platform on the Great Sound in Bermuda.

The broken wing – belonging to the team’s next generation America’s Cup Class competition yacht – suffered a significant fracture in the lower trailing flap causing the entire lower portion to detach completely.

“We were pushing the boat hard today in 20-23 knots of wind”, said Skipper and CEO Dean Barker. “We were doing an upwind run with Oracle Team USA and heard a loud bang as the lower flap of the wing broke and blew off the back of the main element. Fortunately there was no injury to any of the crew and we managed to get the boat back to the dock and avoid any further damage.”

One of only a few testing days to date in this Cup cycle that have seen wind speeds at the top of the design threshold for these boats, the breakage creates a unique learning scenario for team’s designers as they fine-tune their heavy-air wing control systems for the next America’s Cup.

“Any issue like this is always good to happen now as opposed to next year”, continued Barker. “As we learn more about these boats and push them further up the wind range, the loads get increasingly higher. Understanding how hard we can push is a key part of being successful next year.”

With less than eight months until the start of the 2017 America’s Cup Qualifiers, and with build times already forcing teams to finalize their design parameters, there may not be many more opportunities for team’s to test at these extreme levels.

“As with any issue like this it is important to look through all the footage and data to correctly analyze the problem. Jumping to a wrong conclusion early can lead to making some bad decisions.”

The SoftBank Team Japan shore team will now have plenty of sleepless nights ahead of them as they pull double duty in the wing shed.

They’re now tasked with both prepping the team’s backup wing for testing this weekend while also building a new lower appendage for the America’s Cup Class wing as quickly as possible.

“We are fortunate that we will be back out sailing by the weekend”, concluded Barker. “While we will miss a couple more breezy days the week, it is nice to know the program can continue without any significant loss in time.”

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What is the significance of the ability to foil through tacks?

From the perspective of the last America’s Cup and sailing foiling Moths, we’ve seen the progression of being able to sail downwind on the foil, to jibing, going upwind on the foil, and then tacking, which adds up to being able to do the entire race on the foil. The same evolution is happening. In the last Cup we designed the boats thinking we would be foiling downwind and that foiling upwind would be very tricky. Then Oracle kind of proved that wrong using foils that were essentially designed to go downwind. Now we have foils that can provide upwind and downwind foiling, so the next step is just keeping the boat on the foil the entire race. In training, the only time we were coming off the foils was when tacking, so that was obviously the immediate thing to solve.

What was the solution?

It’s the same with the foiling jibe in that it’s learning the technique. Emirates Team New Zealand lead the way with that last time around, so it’s great that Dean [Barker] is probably the first one to do a foiling tack, he having been the first person to probably do a foiling jibe in a boat of this kind. The solution has been about refining our technique and making sure we have the tools to do it. There’s a lot of stuff to align and get people into positions to make that happen.

How much of it is tied the efficiency of the hydraulics?

Having the energy to get the boards down and to sail the boat fast out of the maneuver is essential so there’s a lot going on. There’s an enormous amount of energy that has to be produced to drop a daggerboard and then lift a daggerboard and control the rake during the maneuver. There’s a big oil demand very quickly. The more energy efficient the boats become the better we will get.

When you completed your first foiling tacks in May, was it the result of a calculated progression or a surprise?

When we first started sailing the boat in Bermuda we saw that Oracle was getting really close already. So was Artemis. All of us who sailed in the last Cup knew that the tack would be the next thing we’d be doing and we had a couple of moments where we got close quite a while back and had flashes of what we had to do to make it happen. Then, one day we did two in one day. A bunch of us were laughing because it did happen quite effortlessly, as if we were tacking a Moth. We know that Oracle is doing them now as well because we sail with them. We were with them when we did our first ones. We know Artemis has done a few and I’m sure that the others are doing the same. There might be differences opinion as to who did them first [laughs].

How does the ability to foil tack change your playbook?

It will make for some pretty cool racing because it opens up the racecourse. The losses become a lot smaller in the tacks so our tactical options open up a lot. That’s what we saw last Cup: When ETNZ and Oracle were coming into the bottom gate, for example, it was quite hard to determine which gate they were going to because they were so good at jibing. You’ll see similar things like that with tacking, whereas the losses in tacks will be very, very small. Once, and if everyone’s doing them, the race essentially remains the same. In the pre-start it won’t be as significant, but it will open up the course. Bermuda is a really open course anyhow, where you can really make any side work if you pick the right nooks and crannies. So we’re working on the basis that everyone will be doing it and everyone will be really good at it.

Now that you know how to do them, how do make them better?

They’re getting more consistent, but it’s an evolution. We’re obviously watching how other teams are evolving with their techniques of sailing the boat—whether straight line, tacking or jibing. Different techniques will help others, so we’ll keep an eye on those.

What’s the step-by-step?

Fundamentally, it’s dropping one board, tacking the boat, lifting the other board and coming out still foiling. As I mentioned before, there’s a lot of energy required to get the daggerboard down, and then there’s the timing of the turn and the other things associated with getting the other board up, transferring the load across the boat. There’s a lot to get right to make it happen. There’s no one set way to deal with crew movements. Others do it differently, for example, I’m the first person to cross, but with Oracle, Tom [Slingsby] is the first person and he’s normally grinding.

How precise must the turn be?

We’re always within one or two button presses of it going pretty bad, so it’s important to get right. With the jibe and tack, especially with these boats, the maneuver is never really the same all the time — there’s always something that makes it different . . . a tiny lull or a tiny gust can change things significantly.

So, the million-dollar question: How much do you gain through a foiling tack?

I can’t give you any numbers on that . . . but remember back to the last Cup and the amount of distance someone gained in a foiling jibe over someone that didn’t . . . there’s plenty there. To put it in perspective, though, in an AC45, the World Series boats, we work on the basis that you’ll lose about four boatlengths in a tack, and that’s just going 15 knots into to the tack and going 15 out of the tack, so you can imagine what the advantages are of a foiling tack when we’re going twice as fast.

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As a few challengers and the defender train on Bermuda’s Great Sound with their foiling test platforms, the checklists are long and technical, but there remains a focus on a match race’s most essential skill: winning the start. All the data in the world can’t control when and how quickly six men collectively pull the trigger. It’s something they must drill into their muscle memory until they get it right: get on the foil at full speed, and break away for Mark 1.

“Prestarts will be very exciting in the next Cup,” says SoftBank Team Japan’s Chris Draper. “The boats will be much closer in speed, so there will be more passing and more maneuvers, [and] crew work will be important. They’re highly maneuverable boats and exceptionally fast downwind, but the starts, as always, will be critical.”

How does an America’s Cup team perfect such a fundamental part of the race? We probed Draper further.

“One thing Oracle and Emirates Team New Zealand developed really well in the last Cup was a box that basically helps in their prestart maneuvering,” Draper says. “In the monohull days, you had guys who could look at the box, extrapolate the data, and quite easily determine how long they have to get to the line and how much they have to burn. The boat would hit the line exactly on time. It’s so much harder in these boats (AC45 Turbos) because you have so many other variables. If you don’t make the foiling jibe, your time to the line changes dramatically.

“With Luna Rossa (Italian challenger in the AC35), we didn’t have time to develop a starting package, so we were just using human input and our eyes. At 40 knots, if you’re one second off, it’s a huge difference. Now, in Bermuda, we’re building up our data, we have a nice starting package, and we’re getting to use it, but then we start adding in other things. If it’s 10 knots [of wind], it takes us longer to get onto our foils, for example, but if it’s 18 knots, we can pop up effortlessly and be at target speed very quickly. If you’re not foiling, the other guy is going three times faster.”

What are the most effective drills?

There’s no substitute for doing starting drills against other boats and teams. When you’re slow in the prestart, you’re a duck, so we know we can never be too good at the boat­handling. If our boathandling is good, we can keep it ripping the whole time, making it easier to attack and making it harder for the other boat to defend. We have to be able to put the boat where we want and not be dictated by someone else. In the confined race area in Bermuda, boat­handling will be key. That’s what this next Cup will be about: There will be a lot of maneuvering, and that affects your handling.

You have sophisticated software, but at what point do you start on instincts alone?

We have to develop both at the same time. There are times when the box says one thing, but you’re looking up the course and seeing significant pressure or a shift approaching. So the box is a reference, and then we have to look at what the box can’t see and put the two together. A lot of it comes down to repetition and using the box as a seventh, extra team member.

Speaking of team members, you have six, and they’re all busy in the prestart; explain the roles of each during the final approach.

We’ve got position No. 1 at the front and position No. 6 at the back. No. 1 and 2, their priority all the time is to produce hydraulic pressure for all the functions around the boat: daggerboard controls, wing twist and jibsheets, for example. The guys in the back have the wing and the wing sheet. Then you have wing trimmer and helm. We divide it up so No. 2 is helping with time to the line and jib functions and processing some info that’s coming from the box. No. 3 is doing the timing. No. 4 is giving feedback about the other boat and focusing on the wing. Then No. 5, myself, helps keep the boat going as fast as possible relative to laylines to the starting line. I assist with time and distance and how much time we have to burn while No. 2 is talking about how long to the line.

Dean [Barker] is driving the boat and determining where he wants to go, what the next maneuver is going to be, and how he wants to exit the maneuver. One thing that’s tricky is that someone else is driving [while the helm crosses the boat to the other wheel], so if Dean doesn’t tell me where he wants to go as we exit the maneuver, I can potentially put the boat in a position he doesn’t want to be in. On a monohull, the helm always has control of his destiny, but not in these boats.

There’s a lot going on there, even before you add another boat going after you. How easy is it for one small mistake to make it all end badly?

There’s a massive sequence of functions that have to happen with every single maneuver. When you’re sailing these boats, you’re always within a button press of something going bad, so if one or two buttons get pressed — or don’t get pressed — then the maneuver will get compromised quickly. Getting it right is about building muscle memory in those functions and communicating what’s next. There are only six individuals, and they have loads of things to do, and they need to do them efficiently every time.

Then you add foiling into the equation. How do you keep up with the adjustments?

The more unstable you are while foiling, the faster you go, so the better your control systems and operators are at using the systems, the faster the foils you can have. Dean is constantly adjusting the foils. When it’s puffy or a little bit choppy, for example, you have to adjust the rake often. The more maneuvers you do, the more you have to adjust the rake, and the more adjustments you make, the more oil you need, which means you need more grinding. There’s no way to dumb down or automate the systems because it’s three-dimensional sailing now.

Does the adage “Never get slow in the prestart” apply to foiling AC45s as well?

One of the things we’re seeing in the prestart is the importance of how quickly you can pop up on the foil and how quickly you can stop. If you’re foiling at 40 knots, it’s a lot harder to stop the boat than if you’re displacing at 20 knots. With these boats, compared to the AC72s of the last Cup, we can sail at much higher angles on the foil, so that changes things. The techniques to stop the boat will be more important than before, as will techniques to climb as high as possible and not get hooked. It’s going to be a lot easier to get hooked in the new boats than it was in the 72s.

What’s the ideal final approach in terms of time and distance with the AC45 Turbos?

It’s difficult to say. It depends on the angle you’re sailing and the angle to Mark 1. It might take about 15 seconds to be up, ripping and settled, and the farther you get from the line, the harder it is to judge the time. The ­windier it gets, the faster you go, so it’s always a case of finding the balance. Prestarts will be very exciting in the next Cup. The boats will be much closer in speed, there will be more passing opportunities, and the crew work will be critical. They’re highly maneuverable boats and exceptionally fast downwind, so it will be very cool, from start to finish.

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During testing in Bermuda, SoftBank Team Japan athlete Winston MacFarlane (using Derek Sawards life vest) took an unplanned swim during a gybe. All are safe and accounted for!

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“Right from day 1 of the trials it became clear there were 6 applicants very much in the running for the two available places on the team,” said team skipper and CEO Dean Barker. “However Yuki and Yugo really stood out in all areas of the testing process. Although very different athletes they both had the drive to earn their rights to the two positions.”

Yugo Yoshida, age 31, is an experienced Olympic 470 sailor and comes to the team following campaigns competing in the 2012 London Olympic games as well as several ISAF Sailing World Championships. Yuki Kasatani, age 26, joins the sailing team as a strong competitive rower having competed in the All Japan Cup since 2009 most recently competing in the Coxed Pair and Double Scull events. Both athletes will move to Bermuda immediately to start integrating with the team and begin an intense training regimen preparing them with the physical strength and stamina needed to sail team’s new AC45S race yacht. During races, the new power hungry design of the yacht will push both sailors through a non-stop grinding competition for 20 minutes as they power the hydraulic pumps that adjust the control surfaces on the boat.

In America’s Cup competition, teams are not allowed to use engines to sail the yacht – all processes must be human powered.

While not having raced foiling multihull sailboats before, the outstanding fitness abilities of both athletes will be a massive benefit to SoftBank Team Japan – directly impacting how fast the team can push the boat and pull off complex maneuvers.

“Training wise, Yuki and Yugo’s goals will be slightly different,” said team tactician and sailing manager Chris Draper. “Yugo has a wealth of sailing experience so will be looking to transfer his skills and understanding to the foiling boats. Yuki will be looking to build his knowledge about the boats and been on the water in a different way to what he knows.”

The selection of Yugo and Yuki follows a three-day tryout in Zushi, Japan where 22 Japanese athletes were put through rigorous fitness and sailing tests to determine who would be invited to join the team. “It’s a great time for the team. The trials were a fantastic few days and Yugo and Yuki gave everything they had. Their skill set is everything we could have hoped for and more. We are all very pleased to have them joining us.”

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Chris Draper, an Olympic medalist, multiple European and World champion, and America’s Cup helmsman, is joining SoftBank Team Japan.

In addition to his sailing duties, Draper will take up the role of Sailing Director and will race with SoftBank Team Japan CEO and skipper Dean Barker as well as General Manager Kazuhiko Sofuku at the first Louis Vuitton America’s Cup World Series event in Portsmouth, UK next month.

“The opportunity to join a new team and build it from scratch is very exciting,” Draper said. “I think we’re going to have a fantastic team.

“Dean and I spent a lot of time racing against each other in New Zealand during the build up to the last America’s Cup and developed a mutual respect for each other. When Dean approached me with an offer to join this team it was clear this was a unique opportunity to build something new.”

Draper is a world champion in the Olympic 49er class and won a Bronze Medal at the 2004 Olympic Games.

He was recruited to join Team Korea during the America’s Cup World Series in 2011 and made an immediate impact, driving the rookie team to solid results against experienced Cup crews. Before long he had been pulled across to Luna Rossa Challenge, who he led to the challenger finals, before falling to Barker’s New Zealand team.

“We learned a lot about each other during our time together during the last campaign when we trained with Luna Rossa in Auckland,” Barker said. “Chris is a very skilled sailor brings a lot to our team. We’re fortunate to have him.”

Draper says Barker will be on the helm when racing starts at the Louis Vuitton America’s Cup World Series in Portsmouth. Draper will be in a tactics/wing trimmer role.

“Getting the team off the ground so quickly has been a whirlwind,” Draper said. “I think we’re all looking forward to getting on the water and lining up against the other teams for the first time and just thinking about sailing for a few days.

“The team has huge aspirations. With a competitive boat, we have as good a chance going in to the Cup in 2017 as anyone else and that’s all you can ask for.”

SoftBank Team Japan is led by skipper and CEO Dean Barker along with General Manager Kazuhiko Sofuku and Sailing Director Chris Draper. They are building a team to challenge for the 2017 America’s Cup in Bermuda.

Click here to read more about the America’s Cup.

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