The twelfth day of training with the new prototype began quietly on 2 December. The bay of Cagliari greeted its home team almost romantically on 2 December with a glassy sea and no wind. Initially sailing "for fun" with the largest J1, as the always humorous and eloquent team director Max Sirena vividly reported, the Luna Rossa Prada Pirelli team had already quickly switched back to the smallest J4. By then the 18 knots of wind had arrived, creating an unexpectedly strong east-southeast wave that looked and felt like more than the actual 0.7 metres of height. The Luna Rossa Prada Pirelli projectile became fast and faster.
"If you slow down too much, you run the risk of falling over"
The problem that other Cup teams are already familiar with came up again, especially downwind: The small but highly potent foilers are very challenging to control when there are more waves and especially in higher trajectories. The crews are faced with the constant danger of stalling and sun gusts. With America's Cup star Jimmy Spithill and Nacra 17 Olympic champion Ruggero Tita at the helm, the Azzurri boat increasingly picked up speed in 20 knots of wind and fell off. "That was okay, but it's also difficult with so much wind. It gets bumpy pretty quickly. And you know that if you slow down too much, you run the risk of tipping over," commented Max Sirena on the development.
That's exactly what happened. It was one of those slow-motion capsizes that other teams have also experienced after stalling on the foils and starting to heel as a result. It looks dramatic every time, but the Cup teams - regardless of whether they are using AC40 or LEQ12 test boats - are practising how to deal with it safely. The Italians were proud of how their crew dealt with the mishap. Praise from the America's Cup reporters: "The team on board the Luna Rossa Prada Pirelli had the coolest cats on board today. Ruggero Tita skilfully threw a leg over the side of the capsized boat and remained there almost nonchalantly while the first-class crew took care of righting the LEQ12 in no time at all."
Travelling at speeds of around 44 knots...
"It's part of the game," explained Max Sirena, "we righted the boat quickly. There was no drama or breakage on board." From the perspective of the accompanying "Recon" reconnaissance team, there has recently been much speculation about the number of Italian crew members. There were six crew members on board. There were also speculations about the distribution of roles, which Sirena commented on as follows: "From day one, the plan was to sail with more ballast and more righting moment. We will see this through to the end. And we'll see how the big boys start to get on board and get used to the speed - these boats are pretty fast. We reached speeds of over 44 knots at times today. So it was fun."
Since the introduction of the "Recon" teams (reconnaissance teams), each current team in the 37th America's Cup is permanently accompanied and filmed by two observers sent in a joint decision. The organisers hope that this will provide more transparency and exciting information and images for the fans.
