WITH THE WEIGHT OF HISTORY
If it weren’t for a British challenge laid long ago, there would be no America’s Cup, but that is all ancient history.
FOR the Brits, the America’s Cup is one long-running traumatic disaster. The country that launched the oldest trophy in international sport with a race around the Isle of Wight in 1851 has taken part many times but has never managed to win it. And not winning it remains an open wound on the landscape of a nation that has become obsessed with success on the sports field.
Anyone who dares to have a go at bringing Britain’s longest losing streak in sport to an end must be prepared to confront that legacy, to be reminded of it at every turn, and ultimately risk perpetuating it and going down as yet another loser in the most prestigious sailing competition of them all.
From a young age, Ben Ainslie—officially “Sir Ben” after being knighted in 2013—identified two goals to which he wanted to devote his life. The first was a gold medal in Olympic sailing, which he has achieved four times over; the second was to win the America’s Cup. The weight of history has never seemed to put him off.
INEOS Team UK, representing the Royal Yacht Squadron in the shape of the Nick Holroyd-designed Britannia I, is by far the most powerful expression of his ambition and is also Britain’s strongest tilt at the Cup since the Second World War.
That is a bold call to make, but Ainslie’s team is the best-funded Cup syndicate that Britain has produced in all that time. It has all the money it needs with a budget of around 110 million pounds— so there are none of the usual distractions for the key players, with fundraising or difficult decisions about who and what the team can afford.
It is also the first British tilt at the Cup by a syndicate that has been able to launch back-to-back challenges since Sir Thomas Sopwith’s Endeavour campaigns of 1934 and 1937. For the first time in the modern era, this is a British effort that can benefit from experience and continuity accumulated over two cycles of competition.
INEOS Team UK is based in a well-appointed, purpose-built facility in Portsmouth on the shores of the Solent on England’s south coast. It is entirely funded by Sir Jim Ratcliffe, the billionaire founder of the Anglo-Swiss chemicals multinational INEOS. And in Ainslie, it is led by a sailor who has a long history of experience in the Cup game, the highlight of which was coming on as tactician to help propel Oracle Team USA to victory over Team New Zealand after going 8-1 down in San Francisco in 2013.
Ainslie’s Cup career started long ago when, as a shy youngster, he joined One World Challenge and then Team New Zealand. But the defining experience for him was leading Land Rover BAR (Ben Ainslie Racing) in the last Cup in Bermuda, where his crew was unceremoniously dumped out of the competition at the semifinal stage by Team New Zealand. Their foiling cat was slow, and Ainslie walked away determined to learn lessons from what was a stressful and frustrating experience.
The British five-time Olympic medalist was quite open about what had gone wrong and, by implication, what needed to change next time around. In a first-person piece in Britain’s Daily Telegraph, he said that the design team had produced a boat that was too conservative. “Our daggerboard design ultimately wasn’t aggressive enough—that’s not pointing the finger at our designers; that’s the truth,” he wrote. He went on to explain that the design strategy had got off on the wrong foot in the early stages, and the team was then too late with final modifications. He said that the sailing team was not integrated closely enough with the design group, a facet of Team New Zealand and Alinghi Cup syndicates that the Brits had yet to copy, and he identified the need for “personnel changes.”
The new team, still working under the ambitious slogan “Bringing the Cup Home” and with hugely experienced Australian Cup veteran Grant Simmer in the CEO role, was born. Many of its key players were retained, but lots of new blood was added too, not least Holroyd as chief designer, who arrived following an illustrious career with Team New Zealand and then SoftBank Team Japan.
After abruptly dropping Land Rover and a group of private and other corporate sponsors in favor of Ratcliffe, the runway was cleared for a competitive crack at the AC75.
But then came the first boat, and it was a misstep. Ainslie himself had written in that Daily Telegraph piece that in the design effort, “you have got to get it right at the start.” But Britannia I, an ugly, slab-sided scow-bow affair with a flat bottom that was later modified to add a skeg, looked like an outlier compared with the first efforts of the Americans and the Italians.
Whoever you talk to on the team, you get the same vibe about that boat; it served as a good test bed for control systems, but it looked wrong, it was not going to be competitive, and it put some pressure on the design team to get it right the second time around. As Freddie Carr, INEOS Team UK’s entertainer-in-chief and one of eight grinders on the crew put it, “It was a great test boat, a fantastic learning boat, but I wouldn’t necessarily have wanted to race it.” The concept, with as much emphasis on displacement behavior as foiling, seemed to be based on a misunderstanding of how this Cup was going to be fought out.
Why is this important? Well, because the upshot is that the British team has made by far the biggest step of the three
challengers from boat one to boat two, and inherent in that quantum leap is the danger that the new boat might be too experimental, too much of a lunge forward. Gone is the flat bottom, and in its place is a complex shape with a pronounced and angular skeg to endplate the hull to the surface of the water and with a bustle in the aft sections designed to help the boat get up onto its foils at the earliest opportunity. The cognoscenti have dubbed it the most radical of the challenger boats, and the team itself accepts that.
Using a golfing analogy, Carr said that the first boat was a bit like a player shanking his drive off the first tee and the ball going out of bounds. “There are two ways you can respond to that,” he said. “You can get a 4-iron and play it safe down the middle and try to lay up on the fairway. Or you can get your biggest bloody driver out of the bag and absolutely try to melt it, and I feel like that is what we’ve done. We are going to have a real good swing at it. That’s the mentality of the team. We’ve got this bit of kit, and we know that if we can tame it and get it right, we are going to be in the mix.”
Simmer summed up the journey from boat one to boat two thus: “We’ve got a strong design team led by Nick Holroyd, and I think we’ve taken some pretty bold decisions both with our foils and with our hull shape. There is always risk in doing something like that, but we figured that this class of boat is so extreme and so new that the winner will be the ones who take the right amount of risk and balance that risk correctly.”
Ainslie has professed himself delighted with the new Britannia II. At its launch in Auckland, he called it the best-looking boat he had ever seen. “She really looks like a rocket,” he said. “Hopefully she sails like one as well. I am confident that she will.”
The new hull shape is all about take-off, and a lot of the early on-the-water training on the Hauraki Gulf has been going into that part of the game, as Carr explained. “We are putting a lot of effort into what you call the pop off the line—your trigger pulls,” he said. “You are trying to get up onto the foils early. If you can pop in under 11 knots, if you can jump onto the foils 10 seconds before the other boat, you could have the race in the bag—it’s as simple as that. You could be 150 meters up the racecourse before they’re on the foils, and then you have a very strong hand for the rest of that race.”
The ever-chill Simmer has been performing a team-building role, helping to decide priorities and pilot the team through the inevitable political squabbles with opponents and organizers that infect every America’s Cup buildup. He believes there has been far too much focus on what he called the “hullabaloo” over the hull shape of Britannia II when the key components of the boat are its foils.
In this area, INEOS Team UK might well have an advantage over its challenger rivals through its partnership with the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One team that was announced in December 2019. The Mercedes outfit, led by its Austrian team principal, Toto Wolff, has been the dominant force in Formula One in recent years, and the partnership was very much the brainchild of Wolff and Ratcliffe.
Sometimes these prestigious linkups across different sports or disciplines add up to nothing much in practice, but the word from inside INEOS is that this relationship has blossomed in a way that neither side could have predicted. Mercedes has a phenomenal design and engineering facility at its team HQ in Northamptonshire, north of London, and it is there that the components in successive foil designs have been tested and assembled.
The sailing team has benefited not only from input by Mercedes engineers and its design team, but also from the extremely thorough procurement and quality-control processes the motor racing team uses to aid component reliability—a key ingredient in success, both on the Formula One racetrack and in the America’s Cup.
The sailing team currently has several engineers embedded within it from Mercedes, two of whom are with the syndicate in New Zealand, and no one inside INEOS Team UK can imagine
doing another Cup without the German carmaker’s engineers working alongside them. As Jo Grindley, chief communications and marketing officer, put it, “If you look at the positives that have come out of the relationship, then why would you step back from that?”
Ainslie, who married Georgie Thompson, a former Sky Sports television presenter, in 2014 and now has a 4-year-old daughter, remains the beating heart of INEOS Team UK, and Simmer says that Ainslie “understands the game extremely well.” The Australian veteran says that even at the grand old age of 43, the British skipper has lost none of the cutthroat aggressiveness that has made him such a formidable foe on the water.
“Once we’re on the water, he’s the best,” Ainslie’s CEO remarks. “So right now, we’ve got to deliver him the tool that he can win with.” In that regard, Simmer is investing a lot of his hopes on the latest—version six—iteration of the team’s foil designs, which are due to be delivered to the team in Auckland at some point in the buildup to the Prada Cup.
Carr has worked with Ainslie for years and says his skipper has grown in stature from the shy young man who started out on his Olympic journey at the Atlanta Games in Savannah, Georgia, in 1998. “His Monday-morning speeches to the team are really, really good,” he says. “He has a nice balance. Whether we’ve had a good day on the water or a bad one, he is very, very level. When we need a rocket, we will get one, but not in a throwing-a-teacup-around-thedressing-room way. It is very concise and to the point. And when he has to bang out a bit of a Churchillian chest-beater, he does it without it turning into an emotional journey.”
In addition to Ainslie, the key player on the sailing team is his right-hand man and fellow Finn class Olympic gold medalist,
Giles Scott, who fulfills the role of tactician like he did in the last Cup. The big difference this time is that Britannia II has been set up to allow for seven grinders—one less than their challen;ger rivals— freeing up Scott to get his head out of the boat without his heart rate going off the scale after working on the handles.
The other key players in the afterguard are young Welsh sailor Bleddyn Mon on mainsheet—regarded by his peers as having a brilliant technical mind—and Leigh McMillan, a British Olympic Tornado and Extreme 40 sailor, in the all-important flight-control role.
There is a confident feel to this British team, without any sense of arrogance. You sense that the ethos is one of hard work, attention to detail, the expectation of a hell of a battle to get through the challenger selection series, but a genuine hope that the Cup Match will come their way in March. There is no secret that the aim is to win—not just to take part or get to the Cup Match, but win, something no British America’s Cup team has been willing to admit in years. As Grindley put it: “We’re talking about Ben here, aren’t we? Ben doesn’t do second.”
When it comes to goal-setting, it is worth listening to a non-Brit on the team who is perhaps less emotionally invested in the outcome than his British teammates, but the intent is still very clear. Xabi Fernandez, the 44-year-old Spanish 49er Olympic gold medalist and Volvo Ocean Race skipper, is part of the liaison between the design and sailing teams. He also helps Bleddyn Mon with mainsheet trim technique and has been busy keeping an eye on INEOS Team UK’s opponents.
He too says that this is a confident team from which there is more to come as the Cup draws ever closer. “We know we have a good opportunity, and we are working hard and trying to work through all the details to make sure we are ready when the time comes,” he said. “We know how difficult it is, and we have people with huge experience like Grant Simmer, who has been involved in so many Cups. He knows that how you look now”—this was midNovember—“doesn’t necessarily say how you will be in four or five months when the Cup comes round. We just need to keep working, and hopefully, I really think we are in good shape.”
Simmer was worried about the time remaining and the amount of optimizing and tweaking still left to do. He too believes this team has a shot at the big time, but he also articulated a thought that you hear regularly in discussion about this Cup, namely that the New Zealanders and the Italians had a head start. That’s because they started designing their boat before they released the rule, and certainly in the runup to Christmas, the hosts were ahead of the game. “I think all the challengers believe the Kiwis are leading,” Simmer says.
And so we come back to the weight of history. Simmer knows that Ainslie has to carry it, even if he appears to do so lightly. “Yeah, for sure it weighs on Ben a little bit and Giles and the English sailors because it’s an incredibly lofty goal,” he says. “But most of us are just desperate to win this thing. After you’ve worked on a project for two and a half years, your life changes if you win, and it can be quite the reverse if you don’t win, so we’ve just got to keep that in view and push hard.”