‘ I’d be embarrassed if I was Oracle’
The makers of Team New Zealand’s flying machine are already starting to dream of the next challenge. Of course, they’d need to get Peter Burling and Blair Tuke to agree.
Just think of it, Southern Spars marketing manager Ben Gladwell enthuses. First gold at the Olympics, then winning the America’s Cup, and finally the Volvo Ocean Race. “That would be very cool.”
Gladwell’s talking about Burling and Tuke’s gold medal win at Rio last year, having the Cup well within their grasp and the fact that the Volvo round- the- world race starts in October, plenty of time to jump aboard.
“They’re in a pretty good position to win all three before the age of 30,” Gladwell points out. “Most people spend their entire lives trying to do that. Nobody’s ever done it.”
And all within one Olympic cycle, he adds.
But first things first. We haven’t won the Cup . . . yet.
We’re sitting in the smart Avondale boardroom of Southern Spars, owned by giant UK finance company Oakley Capital.
I’ve battled with signing in on a digital machine and somehow missed a couple of vowels out of my place of work. So now my sticker badge says I work for NZ Hrld. That wouldn’t have happened in the visitor book days.
It’s flash this place — huge, modern and stylish, and immaculately clean. A massive 10,000sq m of purposebuilt factory space, making masts for some of the largest superyachts in the world. And now there’s this boat, this super- fast hydrofoiling wonder.
Gladwell wanders off to make me a cup of tea while Southern’s general manager Peter Batcheler talks about what gives Team New Zealand’s boat the edge. Well, he would, wouldn’t he? Southern Spars built it from scratch, hulls included — a first for them.
Though the Avondale building, with its impressive glass and steelfacade, and a polishedconcrete factory floor that is within 1mm of being perfectly flat, is new on the block, the relationship with Team NZ goes way back to the Sir Peter Blake era.
Southern Spars made the masts for Blake’s Steinlager 11 for the 1989/ 1990 Whitbread and then the rigs for his America’s Cup boat in San Diego in 1995.
Gladwell says he would have been at kindy in those days. Batcheler’s memory goes back a bit further. The factory, or rather a big old shed, was in the Viaduct’s Pakenham St, back when the area was a collection of city markets, rusty fishing boats and boatbuilding yards.
“Put it this way, they used to wear hard hats to stop bits of roof falling on them,” Batcheler says.
But that old shed had to go when boatbuilding changed from carving a shape out of wood to high- tech composite construction, the layering of carbon fibre. Suddenly, quality control was the key. Air quality, temperature and humidity became essential; jigsaws were all but retired.
Suddenly, Southern Spars had to figure out how to build a wing or, as Batcheler puts it, an upended Airbus 330 with a wing stuck on it. But it had to be about a third of the weight and it had to be able to flap. That was back in 2012. “This was whole new scary stuff because we’re now not masking masts which is what’ve we done all our lives and still do,” says Batcheler.
“It becomes a factory process, not a workshop process. That’s the difference between a kid making a bonnet for his RX3 Mazda out of carbon fibre and making something that is genuinely four times the strength of metal and half the weight. And that’s the business we’re in.”
When the Southern Spars team watched their baby pitch pole and capsize in Bermuda’s Great Sound, Batcheler wasn’t too worried. He knew the damage was cosmetic and could be fixed. “The boat didn’t worry me. The wing worried me more.”
A broken wing would be a different story. One break you could patch together. “But if you break into too many bits you run out of bits to chamfer. Two breaks, that gets awkward.”
And if both TNZ’s wings were damaged, there’s no way a new wing could be made in time.
“You’re talking 7500 man- hours,” says Gladwell. “That’s a lot of people for a long time.”
He, like everyone at Southern Spars, is pretty confident Team New Zealand will do well. If they win tomorrow’s races then they’ve won the Cup, he says.
Apart from their foiling set- up the Kiwi boat has a weight advantage, thanks to carbon- fibre technology developed by composite spar maker Brendan Jones and his team.
They used the same technology to develop lightweight racing wheels for Velodrome bikes. They know exactly how much lighter the Kiwi boat is — but they don’t want it in print. “Just say ‘ lots’,” Batcheler says. Gladwell says the weight difference was such that the other America’s Cup teams tried to get the weight window raised to force Team New Zealand to make its boat heavier.
Grant Dalton, “bless him”, refused, he says.
Added to that weight advantage is the TNZ crew, who are lighter overall. They don’t need big, brawny torsos to give them grinding power. The overall weight advantage means they can foil more quickly in light winds. There’s not a lot, they say, that Jimmy can do.
“Jimmy Spithill says everything is still on the table but I think the table is a lot smaller this time because there’s much less than you can do,” says Gladwell.
“If I was Oracle I’d be going sailing. I wouldn’t be pissing round in the shed. I’d be trying to find different ways of using the gear they have.”
In fact he wonders what Oracle has been doing for the past four years.
“To be quite honest I’d be a bit embarrassed if I was Oracle. I would expect to be absolutely smacking us because of the way that the tables were weighted in their favour.
“They spent four years sailing boats very similar to the AC50s and told everybody else that you can’t launch your boat until this year. Four months before the Cup and they’ve had four years.”
Oracle spent “t wo weeks in the shed” making adjustments and then were beaten by Team New Zealand in four races.
“Where else do you look? They should have turned up on day one of the America’s Cup with a boat that was 110 per cent. If anyone is going to make gains, it is probably Team NZ.”
Batcheler and Gladwell think TNZ has other advantages as well. They can tack faster than Oracle, their sailing ability is better and their foils are performing better.
“It’s a hell of a lot wetter up front on the Oracle boat,” says Batcheler. “That creates drag.” Sailors are a superstitious lot so most won’t be drawn on what- nextfor-the- Cup- if- we- win discussions, for fear of jinxing the race. The people at Southern Spars are no different although they do let slip they’ve had discussions with Dalton, who’s said what he thinks the next boats should be.
“We think that’s a pretty good idea, “says Batcheler, “but we’re not going anywhere beyond that.”
So will Team NZ stay with multihulls, or as Oracle fears, go back to traditional monohulls?
Gladwell chooses his words carefully. “If Team New Zealand won, that would prove they have a jump on their competitors in multihulls so you would assume that they stay where they have an advantage. But at the end of the day, it will be the sailing team and design team’s decision.”
Spithill says everything is still on the table but I think the table is a lot smaller this time. Ben Gladwell, Southern Spars