Alinghi Red Bull Racing is determined to win the 2024 Copa América. For this reason, it has been the first team to settle in Barcelona, where it has been dedicated to its work for several months now. While the time for the competition arrives (between September and October of next year) both its crew members and its engineers will work to win a trophy that was last won in 2007, in Valencia. Now they are looking for the perfect combination of muscle and technology. If necessary, they will speed up the time to the last second.
“Everything is highly regulated, but it is clear that we will go to the limit to scratch a thousandth of a second. Engineers are like that. If they tell us that they have to be there by the 23rd, for example, we ask if in the morning or in the afternoon,” he said.to Nicholas Bailey, responsible for the design of the foils. «The foil is in charge of making the hull not touch the water, you have to lift all the weight of the boat with the least possible resistance. Once out of the water, you reduce the resistance by 70 or 80%. Anything you can file will mean a huge jump in performance. In addition, it also plays an important role in balance. You have to design them not only with strength in mind, but to make the boat as manageable and stable as possible,” he explains.
For that, taking into account the rules imposed by Team New Zealand, defender of the trophy, as he confesses, you have to rack your brain a lot. Above all, now that espionage between teams is not only allowed, but is also public and notorious. “It’s fundamental. What has changed in this Copa América is that espionage has become public. Before, each team had its spies and it was even a bit ridiculous, because you went with your boat, your three motorboats, and then there were five more motorboats from other teams who wanted to take photos. You have to put the infrastructure in place so that they can spy on you, you have to give interviews about what we have been testing and all of that is public, it is uploaded to YouTube and is common to all the teams”, Bailey points out.
To compete, yes, both technology and the human factor matter. «It is a mixture between engineering and sailors. In the previous campaign the design of the ship completely changed, they went from being catamarans to monohulls and, when a new class starts, the differences are so great that, in a first cycle, all the engineering part, the ship, plays a role very big. For this second cycle, all the designs are converging quite a lot and more detail is being played with. I think that we will all have similar boats and that the weight of the sailors will be more important than in the previous season », he declared. the sailors also work to the limit.
“Normally, a normal training day starts in the gym. There we warm up, do activations and work on mobility. Then we put the boat in the water, the engineers test everything we have on the boat, we test the controls, the communications. Later, we eat, have a short after-meal moment, and then spend five or six hours browsing. At the end, it is time to take the boat out of the water and clean it well, because the salt is not very good for all the equipment we carry, we return it to its hangar, we check that everything is fine and, meanwhile, the sailors and the staff do a debriefing and we prepare for the next day”, points out Florian Trübtripulante del Alinghi Red Bull Racing.