Team NZ launching radical world wind speed record attempt
America’s Cup champions go from water to the Australian desert to stake a claim for more supremacy. By Duncan Johnstone.
Team New Zealand are taking their prowess off the water with a bold bid to claim the windpowered land speed world record.
The America’s Cup champions have had some of their key designers and engineers on the project since July and their radical land yacht is now in production at the team’s Auckland boatyard.
It should be ready for testing in April before being packed into containers and shipped to Australia for the record attempt, to take place in July-August.
Ace sailor Glenn Ashby will be the pilot on a dry salt lake in the desert, with options of Lake Gairdner in South Australia and Lake Lefroy in Western Australia under scrutiny.
They need to beat the 202.9kmh set by Britain’s Richard Jenkins in the United States in 2009 after he dedicated 10 years to achieving the record.
The funding for this is completely separate to the defence of the America’s Cup with team principal, Matteo de Nora, providing financing.
Team New Zealand believe there will be flow-on benefits for their next yachting campaign with aerodynamics key to the performance of the land yacht.
It continues their growing reputation as an international technology company, coming on the back of their revolutionary hydrogen-powered foiling chase boat.
Ashby and Grant Dalton, the team CEO, share a need for speed through their passion for motorsport and have long discussed having a crack at this record.
Ashby, who has gone more than 300kmh on a motorcycle, raised the prospect of making this
attempt on the eve of the last America’s Cup, believing it could fill a void early in the current Cup cycle. Dalton felt the timing was right.
‘‘It’s good to get people outside their comfort zone and this certainly does that,’’ Dalton said as he challenged his designers to think beyond their normal parameters, feeling it provided fresh motivation and helped break the grind of what will be their fourth consecutive Cup campaign.
‘‘It’s a lift for the team, a new challenge, and brings some fun factor to the organisation.’’ Tim Meldrum, the team’s mechanical engineer, backed that
up, as they looked to replace foils with tyres and bring in safety elements akin to Formula One, all the while being wary of compromising speed on a craft that will be 10m high, 14m long, 7m wide and weigh 2.5 tonnes.
‘‘The crossover into motorsport has been hard. It’s a minefield, I guess we have had to dial in our inner bogan,’’ Meldrum said.
Team New Zealand have been joined by Jarrod Hammond, a propulsion design engineer at Rocket Lab, for this daring project.
Ashby’s cockpit will see him steering and operating the powerful wingsail in a near prone position as he hurtles across the surface with just 5cm clearance.
‘‘This has been a dream of mine for a long time,’’ Ashby told the Sunday Star-Times, explaining they would have a window of five or six weeks in the outback to hopefully have the salt surface and wind conditions align.
‘‘The challenge of becoming the world’s fastest land sailor is a massive mission, it’s like the America’s Cup, it’s extremely difficult to achieve that goal, so much has to come together at the right moment.
‘‘But that’s where Team New Zealand with their out-of-the-box thinking and taking on those seemingly impossible challenges ... it’s something that really makes the inner workings of the team tick. I think that’s why there has been the buy-in from the team. If it was easy, everyone would be doing it.
‘‘It has been really fantastic for the tool and software development heading forward to the next America’s Cup, particularly from a design and engineering perspective.’’