On August 6, 2011, sailor Charles Benedict Ainslie took a break from training for the Olympics to watch TV. The first race of the new season of the America’s Cup World Series merited his attention.
Ainslie had made his reputation as one of the world’s best sailors in dinghy sailing. He had been obsessed with the America’s Cup since the age of 12, when he first saw the 12-metre British yacht that was competing in the America’s Cup harboured in the port of Falmouth, near his home in Cornwall.
However, the trophy that Ainslie had become captivated by had changed almost beyond recognition. The rules allowed the previous winner to dictate the format for the next competition. Larry Ellison, CEO of the Oracle Corporation, the world’s fifth richest man and owner of the America’s Cup-winning team at the time, Oracle Team USA, ditched the traditional majestic-looking yachts for 22-metre catamarans with rigid wingsails, which could reach speeds of more than 90kph.
That decision had been broadly criticised by sailors and designers: the former had little experience piloting these boats, and the latter had little experience designing them. The new class of catamaran, the AC72, was considered an unstable, fragile and complicated structure, which was difficult to sail. Ainslie was among the critics. “Believe it or not, I’m a bit of a traditionalist at heart,” he explains. “I had spent my life developing my skills in classic mono-hull boats.”
Ainslie changed his mind five minutes into the televised broadcast. “I was just impressed by these boats and their speed,” he recalls. “It dawned on me that this was the future of sailing.” The following day, Ainslie phoned Russell Coutts, CEO of Team Oracle USA and a three-time America’s Cup winner. “I want to start a team,” Ainslie told him. “How do I do it?” “I was just about to call you,” Coutts replied. “I want you to come and join us.”
Ainslie agreed to join Oracle to helm its second boat and train as a sparring partner to its main vessel, skippered by Australian Jimmy Spithill in the run-up to the America’s Cup finals, which would take place off San Francisco in 2013.
Ainslie joined the team in August 2012, two weeks after competing for Team GB in the London Olympic Games and winning a gold medal. He was now the most successful Olympic sailor of all time. “I was on a high from the Olympic Games and then, straight away, I was racing in a completely different sport.” Ainslie recalls. “I had never raced in those boats before. I was really on the back foot against the other people I was racing.”
But if the sport was already different by then, later that month it became unrecognisable. On August 29, 2012, photos were posted on an obscure sailing website of Team New Zealand’s AC72 on the Hauraki Gulf, on the North Island, showing the boat sailing with both hulls out of the water. When the images first came to light, Team New Zealand offered no official comment. The images went viral and many considered it a Photoshopped hoax. Less than a week later, the Kiwis invited a group of journalists to see a flying catamaran with their own eyes.
Team New Zealand had been experimenting with one of the boat’s components, the hydrofoil– retractable blades designed to provide stability. The breakthrough happened when they discovered that at wind speeds of 22.2kph, an L-shaped hydrofoil could lift the boat out of the water, which reduced drag and allowed it to accelerate to speeds of up to 92.6kph.
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Flying a catamaran – or, in sailor’s parlance, foiling – added an extra dimension to sailing. Suddenly, sailors had to contend with a sport that seemed to obey different physical laws. Team New Zealand’s skipper Dean Barker equated it to “sailing a monster”. To a relative America’s Cup novice such as Ainslie, this was akin to relearning to sail. “Most of us associate sailing with getting wet and with waves coming over the boat,” Ainslie says. “When you lift up out of the water, you don’t feel that sensation. It’s about the wind blowing over your face, the noise in your ears from the airflow.”
On September 7, 2013, Oracle Team USA and Team New Zealand lined up for the inaugural race of the 34th America’s Cup. The Americans were favourites: they were defending champions sailing in front of a home crowd, and they had a technologically superior boat – a product of Ellison’s millions and Oracle’s top engineers.
On the first day of competition, however, Team New Zealand won race one by a margin of 36 seconds and race two by 52 seconds. By race five, the Kiwis were 4-1 ahead. They were sailing faster; their foiling prowess was superior. The trophy would go to the first team to win nine races. At that point, Team New Zealand was running away with the competition. Before race six, Spithill informed his tactician, a San Franciscan called John Kostecki, whose responsibility was to guide him to the spots with favourable winds, that he was going to be replaced. Then he walked into the office of a sailor with no experience in the role of tactician and asked him whether he was ready to step up. Ainslie said yes.
“Some people close to me suggested it was a bad idea,” Ainslie says. “They were saying that the team was going to lose and that I was just being set up to be the fall guy. To me, there was no question whether or not I should go on that boat. I was asked to do a job and the team needed positivity.” With Ainslie on board, and with the design team making incremental improvements to the AC72 and the crew improving their boat-handling and tactics, Oracle gradually began to match the Kiwis in speed and technique. On day ten, with the score at 8-3 – and with match point to New Zealand – Ainslie decided to disregard their opponents’ strategy and focus on directing Spithill to areas where he believed the wind was strongest. “It was the first time these boats were being raced like that,” Ainslie explains. “The tactical playbook was pretty much thrown out of the window and I started playing around with different ideas.”
With flawless decision-making and a canny ability to “see” wind, Ainslie’s tactical daring propelled Oracle to a comeback. On September 24, with the score at 8-6, Ellison cancelled his keynote speech at Oracle’s largest annual convention – his own event – so that he could watch his sailing team win two races and tie the final at 8-8. In the final race, Oracle moved into the lead during the upwind leg and, on the downwind leg, expanded it, foiling at more than 72.4kph. “This is it! This is it,” Ainslie shouted. “Work your arses off!”
As the boat crossed the finish line, spectators who had gathered on the pier erupted in cheers, having witnessed one of the most extraordinary comebacks in sporting history. Ainslie had triumphed in the sailing competition that had obsessed him since childhood. However, there was still something left to be done. He wanted to win it with a British team.
Qualifying Part one: America’s Cup World Series: Fleet regatta heats for the America’s Cup 2017 were held between 2015 and 2016. Locations included Chicago, Portsmouth, Gothenburg, Bermuda, New York, Toulon, Portsmouth and Fukuoka. Land Rover BAR won the series, earning the UK team two points towards the 2017 Louis Vuitton Cup.
Qualifying Part two: Louis Vuitton America’s Cup qualifiers: This will determine who will face the defending champions in the America’s Cup. Between May 26 and June 3, teams compete in two round-robin stages. The top four advance to the semi-finals. The Louis Vuitton Cup Final takes place between June 10 and 12 in the Great Sound, Bermuda.
The final: 35th America’s Cup: The winner of the Louis Vuitton Cup will then face the defending America’s Cup champions, Oracle Team USA. This event will also be held in the Great Sound, Bermuda. The races will take place between June 17 and 27 – the first team to earn seven points wins the competition.
One cloudy morning in January 2017, Martin Whitmarsh sat in his office in a six-storey building positioned prominently on Portsmouth harbour. He is the CEO of Land Rover Ben Ainslie Racing (BAR), launched in 2014 to compete in the next America’s Cup. This event will take place from May 26 in Bermuda between BAR and teams from Japan, France, Sweden, New Zealand and the cup defenders, Oracle Team USA. Whitmarsh’s office is one of the few rooms on the open-plan top floor, which is sparsely populated by engineers and designers tapping away on computers. Through a light well, one of the windows overlooks the 12-metre-high workshop on the ground floor, where the shore crew assembles and maintains boats. Today, one catamaran occupies a corner of the workshop. It’s a stunning carbon-fibre machine with twin 13.7-metre-long narrow hulls joined by two nine-metre-wide crossbeams. The space between the crossbeams is covered with a netting trampoline. In the middle of the forward beam is a tennis ball-sized titanium sphere where the 38- metre rigid wing is inserted.
Whitmarsh, a slender man in his 50s with close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair and a suave demeanour, spoke excitedly about the America’s Cup trophy, an ornate silver ewer designed by the jewellers Garrard. “I got to touch it yesterday,” he says. “They had flown it from one of Larry Ellison’s lairs in California to London. It travelled in business class with a bodyguard. I asked the guard if he would take a bullet for it. He was taking himself very seriously. When he unwrapped it, I just wanted to touch it with my bare hands. You’re not allowed to do that.”
When Whitmarsh met Ainslie, the sailor had been searching for a CEO for his new team for months. Ainslie, a keen student of America’s Cup history, gave Whitmarsh some context: the America’s Cup is the oldest trophy in the world, first awarded in 1851 by the Royal Yacht Squadron in Cowes, when it was won by the US schooner America against a fleet of 15 British yachts. The trophy was subsequently won 30 times by the Americans. It was also won twice by the Kiwis and the landlocked Swiss, and once by the Australians, but never by the country who had designed it in the first place. That’s what Ainslie wants to rectify, with a UK team capable of returning the cup home; a team that, according to Ainsley, are doing it “for Queen and country”.
It didn’t take much for Ainslie to be persuaded that Whitmarsh was the kind of CEO he needed for his team. “I’d met several people, but it was hard to find someone with the right mix of experience and personality,” Ainslie says. “With Martin, we just clicked.” Although a sailing neophyte, Whitmarsh is a Formula One luminary, who, in 25 years at McLaren – including nine as CEO – capped eight world championships with legendary drivers such as Alain Prost, Ayrton Senna and Lewis Hamilton. He also oversaw the consolidation of F1 as the high-tech pinnacle of sport. “When I started, the cars had manual transmissions and throttle cables,” Whitmarsh says.
Under Whitmarsh, for instance, McLaren was the first team to build a mission control, where car telemetry could be analysed and simulations run in real time. It was also the first to build a racing-car simulator, where drivers could train without leaving their headquarters in Woking, Surrey. The formula behind this innovation was simple. “Asking dumb questions is my specialty,” Whitmarsh explains. “There are hundreds of engineers who are much brighter than me, but about once every three years, you get a eureka moment.”
Just across the corridor from Whitmarsh’s office is BAR’s mission control, a room furnished with a bank of monitors displaying video streams and sensor data live from a black box attached to the windsail of one of BAR’s boats. This data-intensive treatment is part of the reason that Whitmarsh calls the sport “Formula One on water”. Each boat is accessorised with more than 400 sensors. These include video data captured by GoPro cameras, six-axis motion-sensors and fibre-optic cables embedded in the hydrofoils that can monitor how much they are being stressed and bent. The intricacies of analysing data from a high-performance catamaran, however, is in danger of making Formula One’s data analysis look like basic algebra. “In motorsports, most variables are understood,” says Mauricio Muñoz, a Land Rover engineer embedded at BAR. “With these boats, dynamics change depending on the setup and the wind.”
Muñoz recalls spending months grasping the dynamics of foiling catamarans. First, you have a rigid wing – similar to a vertical aeroplane wing – which acts as the boat’s sail. According to simple, but counterintuitive, physics, the wing is capable of propelling the boat forward at three times the speed of the wind. Then there are the hydrofoils, the two L-shaped carbon-fibre appendages encased in the middle of each hull. With 11kph of breeze, these boards create an upward force that elevates the windward hull out of the water, cutting drag in half. At around 22kph, they generate enough force to lift the weight of the catamaran and crew out of the water. While flying, the slim windward hydrofoil and two thin rudders are the only components that make contact with the water. “When you are sailing at speeds of 45 knots, as the pressure changes, the water begins to boil around the surface of the foil,” Muñoz says. “It is that crazy.”
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Muñoz, who has expertise in artificial intelligence, has been using machine learning to sift through sailing data and derive the intricate interactions between boat, water and weather. “Traditionally, the way we tested it was to change a parameter such as the trim profile of the wing or the setup of the hydrofoil. We would sail like that for a while, and then compare the results with previous data,” he says. “Now we can use the data to start running virtual simulations based on our machine-learning models. You build a model of the boat and you run your simulations. You no longer need your sailing team to be running tests for you all the time. We are able to do a big part of it virtually.”
This type of algorithmic approach will be invaluable in testing the boat’s most crucial components such as hydrofoils. “Everything is a compromise when it comes to designing a boat,” Richard Hopkirk, BAR’s engineering manager, explains. “With the hydrofoils, it is a compromise between stability and speed. We could design the ideal hydrofoil that would be the fastest. However, it would also be so unstable that a human would find it impossible to control.”
Ainslie has a slim physique and an elegant comportment. His face is tanned and his dark hair neatly combed. Face to face, he’s personable and almost introverted. The 40-year-old is described by friends as unfailingly polite, a gentleman who’ll remember the name of someone he hasn’t seen in ten years. His demeanour on the boat, however, elicits very different descriptions.
Of course, all sailors have their idiosyncrasies when it comes to boats. For instance, Paul Campbell-James, BAR’s trimmer (the sailor responsible for adjusting the wingsail), likes to be the first on-board and makes sure everything is exactly as he wants it: every lashing done up properly, every line tensioned correctly. “The lads take the piss out of me because they think I’m very nervous to get on-board. I just want things done right,” he explains. David “Freddie” Carr, BAR’s bowman, likes to carry a piece of wood on the boat that he touches before the race: “I am very superstitious. I believe all boats should have wood on them.” On the other hand, Nick Hutton, who is also a trimmer, does not have any particular routine: “I’m from Devon. We just get on with it”.
What happens when Ainslie steps on the boat is not so much an idiosyncrasy, but a metamorphosis. His countenance becomes intense with concentration. His crew calls it “Terminator face”. According to Campbell-James, once the boat’s on the water, a switch is flicked: “There’s no downtime or humour when we are in the water, even in training.”
“When he’s done with all the noise and the management, there’s a moment where you see Ben just changing,” Carr adds. “It’s pretty impressive to witness.” Hutton agrees: “We all see it. Fortunately for me, I’m facing forward on the boat.”
These sailors were very much aware of this reputation when they accepted Ainslie’s job offer to sail for BAR. They knew about his aggressive tactics and uncompromising competitiveness. They knew he was the sort of relentless competitor, who, during a regatta, is capable of jumping on to one of the TV boats to furiously accost a cameraman who had inadvertently interfered with his trajectory – which he did in 2011 in a move that got him disqualified. “In the first few months it was full on,” Hutton recalls. “Then I learned that is part of what makes him so good. He gets five per cent more out of everyone because of it.” In short, the sailors knew that Ainslie was the sort of skipper they wanted to sail with.
Of course, persistent focus and an extra five per cent in performance might be what it takes to sail these boats, which all sailors compare to flying a plane – albeit one without computer-assisted navigation and with unstable dynamics. For instance, as the boat pops of the water, it begins to sequentially lift and drop as the lifting force oscillates around an equilibrium point. Ainslie needs to orchestrate this movement with deft precision, controlling the angle of the hydrofoil with a two-button switch. Add inclement weather and choppy seas to this precarious balance and things can easily spiral out of control. A sharp angle can shoot the bows skyward. A narrow angle will plunge the bows into the sea, exactly like it did during one of BAR’s training sessions in June 2015. The incident projected Ainslie, who was positioned at the stern of the boat, through the air like a crash-test dummy. He was flipped mid-air and ending up colliding with the front crossbeam of the boat. “We are learning that these boats are fast and crazy,” Ainslie says, “and it’s easy for everyone on board to get hyped up.”
On July 25, 2015, the new America’s Cup season began in Portsmouth. It was a sunny day, with winds blowing at 27.8kph in the Solent. These were favourable conditions for the first regatta of the World Series, the initial stage of the America’s Cup: a two-year racing circuit of fleet races in different countries. In the World Series, all teams sail with the same type of boat, with the overall winner earning two points towards the final competition in Bermuda in July 2017. BAR, sailing in front of a home crowd, didn’t have the most auspicious start. It reached the end of the first leg in third place behind leaders Oracle Team USA. As it entered the first downwind leg, two tactical options were available, depending on where the tactician, Giles Scott, could detect stronger winds: towards the shore or further out to sea. “Wind tends to oscillate back and forward,” Scott explains. “You’re looking for darker, glossier patches of water. These are signs that tell you what the breeze is going to do in the next few minutes. It’s a bit of a dark art.”
It’s also a fallible one, especially when it relies on split-second decisions. Scott directed the boat towards the shore and Ainslie’s boat found itself lagging behind the rest of the fleet. “This team is very good at digging deep when they’re experiencing adversity,” says Rob Wilson, BAR’s coach. “If they’re pushed, they’ll push back harder.” By leg six, going downwind, BAR was in first place, with Team New Zealand trailing 351 metres behind. At that point, Ainslie’s boat popped out of the water and accelerated to 44kph. By then, his lead was unassailable. “We thought we sailed a bit scrappy,” Hutton said. “I guess our scrappiness was a little less scrappy than everyone else’s.” Throughout the World Series, BAR became one of the most accomplished outfits. “I feel that when we need to deliver, we don’t raise our game,” Carr says. “We just sink to our highest level of training.”
When Ainslie’s team is performing well, the internal comms system is mostly silent, apart from occasional dialogue between the helmsman and the tactician, while the sailors move in synchrony. “They need to accomplish an extraordinary choreography to manoeuvre that boat,” Whitmarsh says. “You have the helmsman steering the boat, and the guy in front controlling the throttle. Imagine driving a car when you do the steering and someone else is doing the throttle. Then you have sailors in control of other systems that all need to be activated at the right time while flying at 80kph. You have a neural network of six brains looking for wind, checking the boat’s performance, deciding how to keep it flying.”
Then there are moments of brilliance capable of turning a mediocre performance into a victorious one. One such moment took place in 2016, in the penultimate race of the World Series final regatta, in Fukuoka, Japan. BAR needed only to finish one place behind Team New Zealand to clinch the competition. Going into the final downwind leg of the course, however, BAR was behind the fleet, with the Kiwis in the lead. It was a light-wind day and the boats were plodding at the pace of a few knots, making every direction change a laborious manoeuvre. “Ben made an off-the-cuff tactical call and asked for a gybe, then another,” Jones says. “It was a big risk. But once we did the second gybe, we realised what was happening.” The boat gained speed and entered the final gate, overtaking other teams at twice the speed. “All the boats almost stopped,” Jones recalls. “We shot around the outside.”
BAR won the title. “We celebrated,” Jones adds, “then Ben said, ‘What do we need to do to win the next race?’” Which, of course, they did.
BAR launched its race boat R1, named Rita, on February 6, 2017, in the Royal Naval Dockyard in the south-west of Bermuda.
“I name this boat Rita. May God bless her and all who sail on her,” Georgie Ainslie, Ben’s wife and a television presenter, said as she activated a contraption designed to project a bottle of Nyetimber sparkling wine against a pole in front of the boat. The bottle remained intact at the first and second attempts, so the situation was swiftly resolved with a hammer. The boat was then slowly hoisted by a crane and placed on the surface of the Great Sound, the ocean inlet where the America’s Cup will take place this year. Rita is the fourth permutation in the evolutionary line that began with T1 (the boat donated to Ainslie by Oracle), T2 (“Over-ambitious and initially unreliable,” according to Hopkirk); and T3, which the team recurs to as a training boat. “With the World Series, every team was sailing with the same equipment – and our team won. Which shows that we have the best sailing team,” Hopkirk says. “Now it’s our job to give Ben and his team a boat that’s as fast as the competition.”
With a length of 15 metres, Rita is not only a bigger, faster boat than the ones sailed in the World Series, but is also operated differently, making the America’s Cup not only a sailing competition and a technological race, but also a physical contest of brawn and endurance. Gone are the ropes and winches used to control the sails and the hydrofoils. These have been replaced by a hydraulic system comprised of 130 metres of pipes and powered by pedestal-mounted cranks affixed to the hollowed- out hulls of the catamaran.
“With these new boats we’re no longer moving rope, we’re moving hydraulic fluid,” Ben Williams, BAR’s strength and conditioning coach and a former member of the SAS, explains. In other words, every boat manoeuvre will require a supply of human-generated hydraulic power. To do so, apart from the helmsman and the wing trimmer, the remaining four sailors will adopt the role of grinders. These are the sailors who must remain constantly engaged in revolving the cranks. “I lost four kilos over Christmas,” Campbell-James explains. “Ben weighs less than 80kg, as much as he did when he was 18 years old. Because there is a weight restriction for the crew, for every four kilos I lose, that is a kilo of muscle that every grinder can put on.”
The physicality of the competition means that every decision has an added cost. “We might want to make a manoeuvre, but I can’t because the guys don’t have the energy,” Ainslie says. The most aerodynamic position to grind is by working on one’s knees. A tell-tale sign of exhaustion is when the grinders need to stand up. That’s when Ainslie knows that his crew is working flat-out. “That will dictate whether we call a manoeuvre or not,” he explains. “If I steer the boat in the wrong direction, we have wasted energy and it’s demoralising. It is really physical.”
João Medeiros is WIRED’s senior commissioning editor. He wrote about California startup Guardant Health, the creator of a cancer-detecting blood test, in issue 03.17
1. Land Rover BAR: UK: Helmsman Ben Ainslie. Most successful Olympic sailor, with four golds and one silver.
****: Best result: new entrant. Winner of the 2017 World Series.
2. Oracle Team USA: US: Helmsman Jimmy Spithill. Became youngest winner in 2010. Won it again in 2013.
****: Best result: new entrant.
3. Artemis Racing: Sweden: Helmsman Nathan Outteridge. Won a gold medal in the London Olympics, in the 49er class.
****: Best result: semi-finalist in the 2013 Louis Vuitton Cup.
4. Groupama Team France: France: Helmsman Franck Cammas. He is an experienced multihull sailor, but this is his first America’s Cup.
****: Best result: new entrant.
5. Emirates Team New Zealand: New Zealand: Helmsman Peter Burling, 26, is the youngest sailor in the event.
****: Best result: America’s Cup winner in 1995 and 2000.
6. SoftBank Team Japan: Japan: Helmsman Dean Barker. Participated in three America’s Cup finals as Team New Zealand’s skipper.
****: Best result: new entrant.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
