DAN BERNASCONI

The winner of the 2017 John Britten Black Pin said he was accepting the award in recognition of his team. That is true to some degree. But every great team needs someone to lead them. And for the design team behind Emirates Team New Zealand’s America’s Cu

As the team’s technical director, into one incredible moment: sending

It’s been a long voyage for England, his love of numbers took him the tangible rather than the abstract,

This soon led to the role that introduced Bernasconi to the world of high-tech sport, as a vehicle dynamics quickly learned about the day-to pressure, high performance design team

Bernasconi’s own focus became racing process, as every ounce of speed and performance was coaxed out of the

job at McLaren was really cool, I really enjoyed it from an engineering point of view, but I was never that excited by I’ve never been a serious racing sailor,

Aerodynamics, Bernasconi moved to the world of high-performance sailing

is really important, but I think this most recent [America’s Cup-winning] campaign, more than any other, is

where we have three sailors, typically, say the helmsman, wing trimmer and really big screens with steering wheels and wing controllers, basically like a in terms of the performance design and the shape of the boards and the rudders and wing control systems and all of that, was really developed around through all of the possible designs, everything is tested on the simulator and the thing we end up building is

Team New Zealand’s win in Bermuda was a triumph for design and thousands upon thousands of specialists worked to design the most From engineers to management to the sailors, everyone was onboard with their mission: to explore, to be radical

going to be foiling, and it’s not about whether you’re foiling or not – it’s that are easy to sail and ones that are fast, and if you want to design really fast boards it will be unstable, which means it needs a lot of control; that means you’ve got to have someone free who’s able to control that, and we felt if the helmsman is controlling the daggerboard angle he wouldn’t be able to do as good a job of it, and he would also be distracted from being able to and how to sail and make the best of

– or two guys – so cycling was part of that because it means you can be providing power, which we also knew was going to be a real struggle to get that we would be able to do that, and knowing we could have a guy dedicated to it, allowed us to really push how radical we went with the design and

boards to the complex foiling systems

It should come as no surprise, then, that they have their eyes on new the America’s Cup in New Zealand in already exploring new, radical concept

we rely hugely on a whole lot of New a board outside our base that just lists all of our partners, from machine shops, composite manufacturers, boat builders, hydraulic suppliers, technology

of his former teammates are now working with Rocket Lab, leaving the water and launching New Zealand’s

of the America’s Cup to the sailing a huge number of foiling boats out there now and some classes that are of the design of those and some of the

Unsurprisingly, Bernasconi has design is having a clear understanding Being open to exploring as wide a realm

And in the case of Emirates Team New Zealand, that chosen design