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Over the last 3 days I have been watching the Americas Cup World Series in Auckland, New Zealand which is the warm up regatta before the Americas Cup early next year. This gives all the teams a chance to fine tune or change anything that is not working properly. One could say that this regatta was all about data gathering and was just a warm up to the main event. Nothing can be read into the results yet as all of this can change depending on what the teams do and how they use the information.
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The AC75 class yacht uses foils to keep the boat out of the water and they have different types depending on the wind strength. This is so technical and all data driven.
These boats are very technical full of the latest gizmos and technology driven. Basically the teams are given the design of the boat to be raced and then they build it according to the specs. They can make small changes and are allowed to change the foils by up to 20 percent which are the wings on the side of the boats. The foils are the most important part as they keep the hull out of the water making it fly.
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The regatta has seen 4 teams from America, New Zealand, Italy and the UK fight it out to test their packages this week and there have been some mixed results. New Zealand being the hosts have an advantage knowing the local conditions won the 3 day regatta followed by America ,Italy and finally Ineos from the UK.
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Team New Zealand are the team to beat as they have shown they have fewer splash downs as staying on the foils maintaining your speed is the trick to winning.
Ineos have work to do as they lost every race and have 0/6, but all is not lost as they find their feet. These boats are designed to sail out of the water so having your hull touch the surface is not the plan as it slows you down. if any team can turn it around they can as they have a team of 140 with some of the top minds in the world. These guys and girls have 1 month to fix everything that has gone wrong and it will be time to look over the data and make the adjustments. Are the sails working correctly, where are the foils not performing as these are the questions they need to be looking at plus who is the best crew to man the boat. Don't write Ineos off just yet as they have the Mercedes Formula One team working with them and we know what they do with data.
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Every team has made mistakes this week and leads of 1000m have been swallowed up with bad tacking or changes in wind direction. Leads are swallowed up so quickly as these boats travel at over 35 knots which is 65km/h in fairly light winds. These sailing conditions will most likely change come the first race in late January and they now have testing and trials to get things right.