The Final Sprint...

When Alinghi design team co-ordinator Grant Simmer talks about the time to freeze development, you know the America's Cup is close. He's talking about making Alinghi 5 faster and stronger and sailing it higher – while dealing with some of the slings and arrows along the way. There have been few certainties in this Cup but, in theory, by the time of reading, the 33rd America's Cup Match will at last be underway – the New York courts set the dates of 8, 10 and (if needed) 12 February, so even the latest volley of BMW Oracle lawsuits shouldn't change this. Alinghi packed up camp in the UAE in December and shipped back to wintery Valencia, arriving in January for the final sprint to the Match...

Seahorse: What are the roles onboard Alinghi 5?

Grant Simmer: Because the races are 40 miles long with a seven-hour time limit, the helmsmen may end up sharing the driving among themselves. Murray Jones, aka The Captain, is one of the guys with the best understanding of the structure and hydraulics. He normally looks after the rig. Here on Alinghi 5 we are canting it, plus have rake control and different sails going into locks – and the mast needs to be in certain positions to do all that, so Murray is in charge of it. Then we have Warwick Fleury on mainsheet who works closely with the helm. Brad is on tactics, and orchestrating what we do on the racecourse. Juan Vila is navigator, plus there is a team of trimmers with the most senior being Simon Daubney.

We also have Nils Frei, a very experienced multihull sailor, plus Yves Detrey and Lorenzo Mazza, then upfront we have Piet van Nieuwenhuijzen (who is also the boat captain), Rodney Ardern, who works closely with Piet, maintaining the boat and systems, and of course Curtis Blewett and Jan Dekker – both riggers and both in the mast team. These guys love the boat and love the extreme sailing.

SH: Any standouts for you?

GS: I couldn't pick one guy. There are a lot of really good people in this team, and particularly the guys in our shore team who have worked really, really long and hard to get Alinghi 5 built, then get it sailing and keep it sailing. The shore team just work and work – all the time. That includes sailmakers, hydraulics engineers, electronics guys, and of course the boatbuilders and riggers, plus many of the sailors.

SH: To pick one area, what are the challenges for the bow team?

GS: Everything is just really heavy and huge. Working on the trampoline is fine, but they are working out on the spine [bowsprit] quite a lot. Piet and Curtis particularly – just taking a gennaker and attaching the tack is a major task. Everything you do is huge. The sails are that big now with the longer spine and big rig in the boat, the gennaker is one of the biggest ever built. It's huge. The foot length of the gennaker is much longer than a Version 5.0 ACC mast... And of course what you are dealing with on this boat is an apparent wind angle of 25-26°, so you are never really going downwind – you are always going upwind. You never look behind for a gust; you look forward as you would going to windward on another boat.

SH: A key part of any Cup campaign is management of time. How have you structured your days in the past couple of months?

GS: The schedule is normally set by Murray, Brad and me. We have a list of things we want to test – including sails – and that list is set a month in advance. We have had to drop a few projects because we didn't think we could get them done and tested in time, but for Valencia it's still quite a tight schedule. We are stopping testing, freezing development and getting ready to race.

SH: Who looks at the day's data?

GS: Luc Dubois is our test engineer with a team around him. We have a debrief an hour after we return to the dock, where the sailing and design team go over the data for what we did that day. This gives us a summary, then Luc spends time that evening and early the following morning analysing the data more thoroughly, focusing on what people raised in the debrief. By 10:00 the next morning the data will have been reviewed in much more detail and is then worked into that day's plan.

SH: In the data over the past couple of months have you seen incremental improvements, or are there areas still with a steep performance curve?

GS: We have been focusing on certain areas that we haven't been happy with since day one, so we are gradually making improvements. There is a lot of action downwind in multihull racing – whereas upwind is generally more stable, so we have really been focusing on downwind performance and I think we have made some good progress there.

SH: How would you summarise the benefits of your time in Ras Al Khaimah?

GS: Invaluable. We were bitterly disappointed by the court decision; it is difficult to think of a place where we could have gone and achieved as much as we did there. We had a really good base in RAK, functionally it worked very well, and it was very disappointing for the Emiratis, who had so much enthusiasm for the event, and who supported what we were doing.

SH: Even at this stage, are there areas you have had to review?

GS: We are measuring loads all the time in the boat's structure, and there are certain areas in the boat where the alarms have been more frequent... so we focus on those areas. The engineers have done a remarkable job. I don't think any part is over-designed and the whole boat gets loaded up quite evenly; and we are not just concerned with the loads on the beams, but the spine and all the sub-structures as well.

I think Kurt Jordan and Dirk Kramers have done an outstanding job of building a boat that is structurally on the edge. Alinghi 5 is not designed to go racing around in big waves – it never was, so it seems to be a good compromise between weight, strength and stiffness.

SH: The ball socket that the mast sits on is not large...

GS: It is just a high-strength steel ball. Rotation, canting and rake are constantly changing, and the compression loads are roughly 120 tonnes on something the size of a tennis ball... It's fine. Our mast engineer Kirst Feddersen has been with us since the very first campaign, he designed all our custom mast fittings. They have been great.

SH: The spine has been lengthened. How long ago was that idea raised?

GS: We decided to do this when we were in Genoa, so we had to modify our tooling from the original spine and built the new one in our Villeneuve yard. We had to make new rigging underneath it, and there are a number of metal fittings that are either bonded or bolted to the carbon tube, so we made new ones of those. The new spine has the new forestay located in the same position as the old forestay, it has the Code Zero furler at the point where the old spine ended, plus it has a new gennaker attachment further forward.

So now we can race with a jib on the forestay, a Code Zero tacked on the furler and the big gennaker upfront. All this will help us now we are racing in Valencia, as we are expecting sails to go up and down a lot more than in RAK. Having two tack points for the Zero and gennaker is an asset – even though you pay a small weight penalty.

Kurt and Dirk tuned the spine, which is just like tuning a mast... but a bit more complicated. Kurt does it in his FEM modelling, and then we fit spacers and thimbles to allow us to adjust the rigging to share the load correctly. We then measure the loads and the deflections of the spine tube, as well as the elongation of the rigging.

SH: What implication has the new spine on balance?

GS: Upwind it doesn't make any difference at all, but downwind with the longer spine we get more lee helm. But the boards on Alinghi 5 are quite far forward, so that is not unacceptable and, with the big gennaker up, you load up very quickly, so it is quite nice to have lee helm... the escape is down!

SH: And how is the boat to drive?

GS: They never let me drive it! Everyone is lining up to drive the boat at 30kt... But, as with any boat, balance varies with different sail plans and different twists in the mainsail, and the combination of the twist in the headsail and mainsail. The boat is quickly overpowered with such a huge sail plan, so keeping her in balance when you are overpowered is the key thing for the trimmers.

SH: Have you been in the 'red zone' as far as flying the windward hull too high?

GS: It is interesting. In the early days everyone was fearful of flying too high where your stability is diminishing, but now we are much more comfortable. You get used to being a long way up in the air, and not particularly worried about it...

SH: Over the past couple of years there has been quite a bit of mud thrown at Alinghi and particularly Ernesto. How have the team risen above that?

GS: Ernesto moved to RAK with his family along with the rest of us. He is one of the team. All of us think that the mud thrown at the team and at him is disgusting and, to my mind, must rank as one of the low points of sailing. All that stuff is just blatantly made up.

SH: This is the third America's Cup for Alinghi. How important is this one for the team and for Ernesto?

GS: (Pause) That is a tough question. Nobody at Alinghi set out to end up where we are today. We worked hard on having a multiple challenger event and I think we have tried to make the best of the Deed of Gift multihull event that we now find ourselves with. I think from Ernesto's point of view he loves the technology, and he has always loved multihulls, and so to have the excuse to build a boat that is this extreme – so extreme – is something he and we may never do again in our lives. If there is a good thing that has come out of this, it has been the opportunity to build a boat like Alinghi 5.

SH: What are your thoughts about Alinghi after this Cup?

GS: I think it depends on the outcome. We are keen to keep going, but I think it is important to get back to a conventional Cup with multiple challengers, where the Defender has some rights and there is a mutual-consent deal in place – all of us would want to be a part of that. The spirit of the team is very strong and I think if we can get back to a mutual-consent event, with an acceptable protocol for the challengers, we will work forward with that.

SH: Given this is such an unknown match, what, if anything, makes you nervous...

GS: Well, the boats are very, very different, and the sail plan is one of the biggest differences... I am nervous there will be big differences in performance. And maybe not consistently – one boat may be faster upwind, or one boat faster in light airs. We tried to predict that, but it is very difficult to predict with their wing. If the wing is deemed to be Deed compliant, their design and engineering team have done a great job.

Building a wing of that scale and complexity is pretty damned impressive. They had a couple of problems in the first few days – which is to be expected – then they got it online and working, and it looked good.

AC Update

Alinghi 5 went for its first sail in Spanish waters on 15 January and, with just 24 days until the first race for the 33rd America’s Cup, every hour on the water counts, as Murray Jones, in charge of the sailing programme, points out. ‘We are ready to go racing on 8 February, but of course we have no idea how many sailable days we will have between now and the Match so our focus will be on racing the boat over the remaining few weeks.’

While the Swiss team focus on the upcoming Match their lawyers are being kept busy with BMW Oracle’s latest legal attack – their ninth to date – about their interpretation of the ‘constructed in country’ requirement of the Deed of Gift. Societe Nautique de Geneve’s position is that the defending yacht has been constructed in Switzerland in compliance with the provision in the Deed of Gift, which does not expressly impose obligations in respect of any of the separate components onboard the yacht or vessel.

Unlike BMW Oracle’s boat, which derives from France and Germany in terms of design and technology, Alinghi maintain that their multihull and its sails are deeply rooted in Swiss technology and are constructed in Villeneuve, Switzerland. Furthermore, the 3DL process of making sails is subject to Swiss intellectual property rights. The inventors of the process, Jean-Pierre Baudet and Luc Dubois, are Swiss engineers...