Ben Ainslie Racing
The British AC team is the first to start work on developing a playbook for the Bermuda venue
Ben Ainslie Racing is the first Cup team to start active training on the water in Bermuda. On the face of it, there is nothing surprising about starting a Cup campaign this early, especially at a new venue. But what makes the team’s account of how they are going about assessing the venue, ‘writing the playbook’ as they call it more remarkable to me is how quickly they have moved on from learning to handle eye-watering quick, twin trapeze, foiling cats to concentrating on figuring out what makes the new course area tick.
Achieving this relies on being able to sail two boats with such consistency and accuracy that you can draw sensible conclusions from the differences. That in itself is surely no mean feat for a machine so potent as to give the rest of us nightmares for months. And yet as their latest report demonstrates, the new Cup cycle has upped the ante yet again.
The 35th Cup is already moving at a blistering pace.
BERMUDA TRAINING WRITING THE PLAYBOOK
Bermuda will be the venue for the 35th America’s Cup. It’s a brand new race track for foiling multihulls, and Ben Ainslie Racing (BAR) were the first to test it back in January. It was immediately clear that it would be much more of a strategic and tactical test than the drag race that dominated the 34th Cup match in San Francisco.
Many valuable lessons were learned by the sailing team during their January training camp, not least of which was to return as soon as possible to start work on analysing the intricacies of the race course. Sailing Manager Jono Macbeth and new Team Coach Rob Wilson will lead the project to develop …read more
