Cup Experience

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Royal Visits to Portsmouth AC World Series

Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh will visit the Land Rover BAR base on Friday and meet the design team. Here he is helming his Dragon “Bluebottle” in 1957. The young crew might be Prince Charles.

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Prince Philip, now 95 years old and husband of Queen Elizabeth, enthusiastically campaigned his Dragon in the Cowes Week regattas. He is a former commodore of the Royal Yacht Squadron, whose subsidiary, Yacht Squadron Racing, is represented by Land Rover BAR.

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge will be in Portsmouth to watch Sunday’s racing and to present the awards at the prizegiving.

The Duchess of Cambridge takes the helm on Land Rover BAR's T1. (L-R) Nick Hutton, Paul Campbell-James, David Carr, Sir Ben Ainslie, The Duchess of Cambridge

Her Royal Highness Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge at the helm of Land Rover BAR’s T1 test boat in May. More info and photos of the Duchess sailing with Sir Ben here.

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Crew Lineups for Portsmouth

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Crew lineups have been shaken up with some of the top sailors off in Rio preparing for the Olympics. Skipper Glenn Ashby will be on the helm for series leader Emirates Team New Zealand replacing Peter Burling. Francesco Bruni will steer Artemis Racing since Nathan Outteridge is in South America getting ready to battle Burling for the 49er gold. More on that next week. Ben Ainslie will once again be without tactician Giles Scott, the favorite in the Finn class. Giles already missed the last AC World Series event, but the Brits showed the depth of their bench, taking second in the Chicago event.

The only opportunity to train in the one design AC45F’s is at the AC World Series events – sailing on Thursday and practice racing on Friday. Francesco Bruni has never raced an AC45F and Glenn Ashby has not helmed in previous racing. Both are top sailors but will have their work cut out for them. Ed Powys will once again handle tactics in place of Giles Scott on Land Rover BAR.

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Key Moment for Grabbing the Bonus Points for the 2017 AC Qualifiers

With six of the nine AC World Series events completed, the teams go into Portsmouth with three teams fighting at the top of the leaderboard. One of them will end the series empty handed when it wraps up in Fukuoka, Japan in November. Emirates Team New Zealand continues to lead the series, with Land Rover BAR and Oracle Team USA tied on points.

America’s Cup competition format and scoring explained here.

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Dean Barker and his men on SoftBank Team Japan hope to build on their good showing in Chicago, where they were on the podium for the first time. Franck Cammas’s Groupama Team France won races in Oman and New York and will try to bounce back from their poor results in Chicago.

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Building the AC Class Race Yachts for 2017

Boatbuilding crews are hard at work building the AC Class race boats (often called AC50). The hulls are built in three pieces. The lower section has most of the structure, including the cockpit floor and the reinforcement for the daggerboard cage. The upper section has cutouts for the crew cockpits. The 2.7 meter long bow section unbolts so the hull can fit in a 40 foot container. The skin of that bow section is the only part of the yacht required to be built in the country of the yacht club it represents. Oracle and Team Japan are having their boats built at Core Builders in New Zealand. Team New Zealand is also building their boat in New Zealand, at Cooksons. Artemis Racing, Land Rover BAR and Groupama Team France are all building their boats in their home countries, using tooling furnished by Core Builders.

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Upper half of an AC Class hull – the “deck.” It will be joined with the lower hull section and the bow section will bolt on. Thanks to Richard Gladwell of Sail-World for the photograph. Richard has many more photos and lots of detail in two articles, here and here.

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Kiwi Surprise: New aC45X Test Boat Launched

Emirates Team New Zealand launched their AC45X experimental test boat in Auckland last week. The New Zealanders have been very quiet, with little news of any substance coming out of their camp. In the last campaign some members of the team leadership felt they tipped their hand too early, showing off foiling in their AC72. They kept this boat a secret until the launch, and even then, they kept some secrets. Look closely at the photos. What’s missing?

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Team New Zealand launched their AC45X test boat with a new graphic design.

The wing is an AC Class wing. You can tell by the smooth curve of the trailing edge.

Did you notice that there are no daggerboards fitted? I guess they want to keep those hidden a while longer.

Like Land Rover BAR, ETNZ has hung the rudders off an extension. The hulls of the experimental boats are 45 feet long, five feet less than the AC Class race boats. The extensions make the distance between the daggerboards and the rudders closer to the geometry of the AC Class yachts.

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Land Rover BAR rudder mounts ETNZ rudder mounts