Matthew Sheahan
TECHNOLOGICAL ADVANCES IN THE NEW F50S COULD MAKE REACHING THE 50-KNOT SPEED MARK ALMOST COMMONPLACE
On the face of it, the inaugural Sailgp event in Sydney is simply the unveiling of a new professional foiling multihull circuit. Six teams will be racing around a course that looks very similar to the America’s Cup configuration, aboard boats that will be indistinguishable from those used in Bermuda in 2017.
It’s hardly surprising. The boats, the course and many of the sailors – along with the brains and money behind this new global circuit – come straight from the last Cup.
Yet there’s also good reason to believe this circuit will deliver far more than simply re-skinning an existing format. These new boats represent a big step forward for sailing and could mark a step change for the sport.
Having decided not to challenge for the next America’s Cup, Oracle boss Larry Ellison and Cup maestro Russell Coutts believed that the flying cats from Bermuda were the start, not the end, of a high performance revolution, a proof of concept towards a bigger goal.
Their plan involved refitting three existing Cup boats and then building three new ones to create a fleet of identical one design F50 foiling cats. This, in itself, was an ambitious and expensive project. But it was the inner workings of these boats, with their fly-by-wire control systems, that will allow crews to sail their boats in ways that have not been physically possible before.
An important part of this is the electrical power that is used to drive the hydraulic controls rather than the muscle power used aboard the Cup boats.
These two key features among the long list of technical advances have led to the bold claims that the F50s will be capable of racing at over 50 knots in the right conditions.
“The crews no longer have a restriction on energy,” explains Sail GP’S tech team operations manager Brad Marsh. “They’re able to make adjustments all the way around the racetrack, as much as they need to. Previously, a boat couldn’t tack if it didn’t have enough energy. So crews didn’t trim as much as they might have wanted, or move the daggerboard very much because it would take the energy that they needed for the next manoeuvre.
“Now, they have unlimited capacity. They can trim, tune and tweak, push the button as much as they like without having to worry about how they can restore energy for the next manoeuvre.”
As chief test pilot for the F50 programme, and as Artemis’ former Cup helmsman, Nathan Outteridge knows this well and is in no doubt about just how big a change this represents. Yet interestingly he says it hasn’t necessarily made things easier.
“The boat is significantly harder to sail than it was in Bermuda,” he says. “The foils are more unstable, the boats go faster and there’s more load on wing sheets than there was previously.”
What it has done is to make the boats quicker, making taming the beast the first priority.
“Straight line flight control was our first focus. Then our focus shifted to manoeuvring and how to get the boards down consistently,” he adds. “There’s now a computer system on board that measures the speed and pitch of the boat and it selects the board drop angle based on all of that information. You can hit the down button and the board should lower at a neutral angle before it is locked in place.”
It’s easy to see how this technology could help with, say, fly-by-wire steering systems aboard tomorrow’s cruisers, not to mention race boats.
But the way that the team was making the changes to the prototype was also very different. After each day of testing Outteridge and the team would go through the normal debrief to allow the design team to work on key changes overnight. By morning the boat’s software would be upgraded and installed before the next round of tests.
“Every day we were developing what would have taken around a week before,” he explains.
The ability to upgrade the boats by providing software upgrades illustrates how the F50s will be developed and tweaked in the future.
Just ten years ago, 50 knots was sailing’s sound barrier. And while a few have now smashed their way through, such speeds are far from commonplace. The technology under the skin of the new F50s could change that.
‘FLY-BY-WIRE CONTROLS ALLOW CREW TO SAIL AS NEVER BEFORE’