COMMENT
WHEN AEROSPACE COMPANIES ARE INTERESTED IN SAILING TECHNOLOGY, THAT’S WHEN YOU KNOW IT’S GOT COMPLICATED…
High performance sailing is rocket science – or so it would seem given the recent acquisition of SailGP’s manufacturing facility in Warkworth, New Zealand, by the American company Rocket Lab.
Responsible for the wing-masted AC45s (when the company was known as Core Builders Composites), and going on to produce the F50 foiling one-design catamarans that emerged after the 2017 America’s Cup, SailGP Technologies has built an impressive fleet of the world’s most advanced foiling carbon cats.
So now, with SailGP’s production moving to Southampton in the UK, the focus for the Kiwi company will be on supplying advanced composite components for Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket and working on the development of Neutron, Rocket Lab’s new 13,000kg payload class rocket – proper rocket science.
I’d argue that what SailGP has achieved since it began in 2018 is indeed the sailing equivalent of rocket science. The circuit has not only pushed at the boundaries of what has been technically possible, but has required some of the world’s best sailors to learn a new way of sailing.
It’s also interesting to see how SailGP is converging with the America’s Cup which, for 172 years, has always been primarily a design race. Now those two worlds are not only coming closer together, but are feeding off one another and helping to raise the game of the teams involved. The America’s Cup and SailGP are now on interdependent paths, where some sailors and teams are using the foiling cat series to sharpen their skills in their Cup campaigns.
And while SailGP’s foiling cats and the Cup’s foiling monohulls may be very different, the speeds and the intensity of the new style of sailing in both means that there’s plenty to learn. With data sharing being both a rule and a right in SailGP, teams are learning new tricks and techniques incredibly quickly and are raising the overall game at the sharp end of the sport.
Keeping competition close was one of the key objectives of SailGP and the advanced data telemetry systems, along with the analysis tools that are available to all the teams, has helped to achieve this.
Now that knowledge is spilling over into the Cup. At the first America’s Cup preliminary event in Vilanova i la Getrú, Spain, where Cup teams were racing for the first time officially in the AC40 one designs, I asked those who were also involved in SailGP how important doing both circuits was.
Jimmy Spithill, who is with Luna Rossa Prada Pirelli in
