America's Cup: "We've never seen anything like this before"

"The first challenge will be to get the Cup boat in the water," comments Luna Rossa's team director and skipper Max Sirena on his team's current testing phase and the upcoming christening of the new foiling Cup maxis next spring. "It's a new class, it's going to be a pretty exciting boat and we're currently running a lot of simulations through the computers."

This applies not only to the Italian "Challenger of Record", but to all challengers and the defenders from Emirates Team New Zealand. Sirena explains: "We have our base camp in Cagliari in Sardinia and are really looking forward to experiencing the real boat in full size on the water." These boats, says American Magic skipper and team director Terry Hutchinson, "will rise out of the water at 17 knots and then accelerate to 40 knots".

Sir Ben Ainslie from the British Ineos Team UK also raves about the current Solent training in the smaller test boat and the idea of soon switching to the foiling monohull for the America's Cup: "It's a pretty incredible boat!" The task for the upcoming Cup edition is simply defined for Ainslie: "You have to have the fastest boat to win the Cup. That's the challenge!" The task is to build, tame and optimise 75-foot-long foiling new monohulls that look like a cross between a giant spider and a space glider. "I'm looking forward to the speed potential of these boats. They are boats that have never been seen like this before," enthuses Terry Hutchinson a little less than 900 days before the start of the next Cup regatta.

In more or less secret runs, all teams apart from the New Zealand defenders are currently trying out technical developments on their test boats, each of which is less than twelve metres long - the Cup protocol does not allow any longer. The Americans have been doing this since the official presentation of their test boat in Newport (Rhode Island) on 26 October, which has a completely different hull shape to the heavily modified former Quant 28 of the British. The British have been in action with their "T5" since June. Ainslie and his men were too late for the last edition of the Cup and paid dearly for this with speed problems on their catamaran at the 35th Cup rivalry off Bermuda. The team, which can operate with an impressive Ineos budget of around 126 million euros, has not repeated this mistake. It will be exciting to see who will be the first to bring their boat into action in full Cup size from the permitted date of 31 March 2019.