Ashby’s flying on wingsail

He is sailing’s ultimate wingman.

Team New Zealand skipper Glenn Ashby’s mastery of the science and the art of trimming rigid wingsails is considered one of the underlying factors in the speed edge of the Kiwi boat in this America’s Cup.

Much fascination from Cup observers has surrounded the set-up of the New Zealand wing, and the “Xbox console” from which Ashby controls it. While the other race yachts in this year’s America’s Cup employed a traditional hydraulic winch system to control the wing, Ashby is adjusting the twist and camber in the wing via a toggle on his little handset.

It gives Ashby the ability to make micro adjustments to the wing — sometimes just a case of a few millimetres — swiftly and accurately.

The Australian multihull veteran, who at 39 “buggers up the average age” in the young Team NZ crew, admits he is pretty chuffed with his nifty toy.

“We think said.

The development, says Ashby, is it’s pretty special,” he all down to brilliant customer service on behalf of the Team NZ designers. Early in the design process Ashby, who has always had a fascination with how things work, had firm ideas of how he would like the control system to operate.

“I had some ideas of what I’d like as a customer, and Steve Collie and Martin McElwee had some fantastic ideas of how to implement those features,” he said. “Those guys are very, very clever guys. You look inside the thing and you go ‘how the hell can you make all that work’?”

While Ashby has sung the praises