Balancing act

Essential to achieving fair competition has been equalising the two pairs of boats for even performance around the race track

One of the most fundamental parts of the preparation for the Louis Vuitton Trophy Nice Côte d’Azur has been the equalisation of the two pairs of America’s Cup Version 5 boats competing here. For unlike the America’s Cup where the design of a team’s boat is vital to its overall result, at this regatta it is the opposite – the performance of each pair of boats should be identical, with results being solely down to the skill of each sailing team.



Italian shipping magnate Vincenzo Onorato may not be competing at this regatta, but his team is very much in evidence as his 2007 generation Mascalzone Latino boats ITA90 and ITA99 are one of the two pairs. Luckily the hulls of these two boats are identical with the exception of the bows and keel bulbs. Mascalzone Latino CEO Francesco Aversano says they carried out much telemetry between the boats in the build-up to the 32nd America’s Cup and the performance difference between them is minute: “Their speed was almost the same - it depends on the wind and sea state, but more or less 2-3m/minute, so it has been easy for us to have the same speed of the boat by working on 99 to make it a little slower.” This has involved adjusting the rake of the mast.

However when recommissioning work began on the two boats on 1 September, there was a lot to do for their 16 strong shore team. The boats hadn’t been used since the Louis Vuitton Cup in 2007 and Aversano says they had been stripped of everything – no winches, electronics, etc. They put them back together, took them sailing in Valencia and then brought them to Nice. Aversano is convinced their performance is now as close as it can be. “With the short races, 20 minutes a leg, the difference isn’t enough. You can’t overtake someone just through speed,” he says.

The work was harder for the TEAMORIGIN shore crew who were responsible for matching up their own GBR-75 (formerly Alinghi’s 2003 generation SUI-75) with the Franco-German team ALL4ONE’s very different FRA-93. Matters were made no easier by the British boat being in the UK, FRA-93 in Valencia and a regatta to attend in Nice. 30 TEAMORIGIN shore crew were faced with the giant task of equalising the boats over the space of just three weeks. To do this the winglets were taken off the bulbs, but the main changes were made to the rigs that were set up in a similar way.

TEAMORIGIN’s Mike Sanderson explains: “The biggest thing that we did was to move heaven and earth to make sure that the boats had identical sails on them. The rigs are pretty similar and we set them up in a similar fashion. So as long as there were two pretty reasonable boats, doing that to them was going to make them as close as they could ever be.”

Surprisingly, rather than using the sails that came with either boat, they instead are using sails supplied by BMW Oracle Racing from their V5 Cup boats, and these had to be flown up from Auckland. Then there was then the challenging task of getting these sails to fit GBR75 and FRA93, particularly by altering mainsail foot lengths and their halyard lock systems.

GBR-75 and FRA-93 have been further equalised over the course of the regatta by swapping sails to detune the performance of 75. In the early matches, teams who won the toss to choose their favourite boat or favoured end of the line were selecting 75, the boat that Alinghi used to such devastating effect in the Louis Vuitton Acts of 2005 and 2006. But it speaks well of the equalisation of these boats that as the regatta has gone on, more teams have chosen 93 or sacrificed their choice of boat in favour of choosing their desired end of the start line.

There remains plenty of discussion about how the boats could be equalised further, even the prospect of a one-design being especially built for future editions of the Louis Vuitton Trophy. But in the meantime the Version 5 boats are performing an admirable task, remain as challenging as ever to sail and perhaps more importantly have been given a ‘raison d’etre’ post-Valencia.