British America's Cup entry favourite to reach final stage & eliminate Italy — with F1 tech

Boats & racing

Ineos Britannia team needs one more win in heats to defeat Italy and challenge New Zealand for the America's Cup

Ineos Britannia and Luna Rosso boats in 2024 Americas Cup

British and Italian teams are duelling in a bid to challenge New Zealand for the America's Cup

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Britain’s America’s Cup team is on the brink of succeeding in its mission to reach the final stage of this year’s competition and challenge the holders, New Zealand.

The Ineos-backed crew is one head-to-head race win away from progressing today and eliminating Italy, in a competition that’s regularly described as Formula 1 on water.

In fact, the Ben Ainslie-led British boat has been designed in partnership with the Mercedes F1 team, while New Zealand is defending the Cup with a team whose technical director was previously part of the F1 championship-winning McLaren squad.

As in Formula 1 the aerodynamics of the carbon-fibre craft will play a decisive role in the outcome of this year’s America’s Cup. The boats rise out of the water at speed, skimming on hydrofoils to reduce drag. The efficiency of each design — and how it can adapt to changing sea and wind conditions — will determine whether Britain or Italy will win for the very first time, or whether New Zealand will retain the trophy that it won from the US team in 2021.

In the November issue of Motor Sport, on sale now, we explore the remarkable crossover between the top tier of motor racing, and the oldest international competition still running — the America’s Cup having begun with a race around the Isle of Wight in 1851.

Daniel Bernasconi, who worked on mathematical models and vehicle simulations for McLaren from 1998 to 2004, is now technical director of Team New Zealand, playing a role in its successful capture of the America’s Cup the last time that the competition was held in 2021.

From the archive

“There are really strong similarities between F1 and America’s Cup, so it was a natural transition,” he tells Adam Hay-Nicholls in our latest issue. “In both cases, you win with a combination of the best technology and the best drivers – or helmsmen.

“Generally, the race is won by the fastest car or the fastest boat, but if no one has a big technical advantage, it comes down to human beings to extract the maximum from the opportunities. That’s where it comes down to tactics, strategy, and pushing everything to the limit.

“In F1, you have one driver in each car. In the America’s Cup this year, you have eight sailors per boat. Like grand prix racing, teams field many unseen people working in design, engineering and operations. There are a hundred people working to try and get that car or that boat to cross the finish line first. Team New Zealand’s design office is 45 people alone, and they’re all at the top of their game.”

The fine margins seen between teams in Formula 1 have been also evidenced on the water this year in Barcelona. The Mediterranean coast is hosting the America’s Cup series, which includes the battle to select the team that will challenge New Zealand later this month — called the Louis Vuitton Cup.

Three of the five challengers (US, Switzerland and France) have been gradually eliminated after a series of rounds involving head-to-head races, where the winning margin is typically measured in seconds after races that last for between 25 and 45 minutes.

Louis Vuitton Cup Final

Ineos Britannia vs Luna Rosso: crews are looking for marginal gains amid close competition

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Each heat takes place on the 1.8 mile course and the two boats race up and down the course four times (eight legs in total). The first to finish claims a point. In the latter rounds, these heats continue until one team accrues seven points and is declared the winner.

Britain’s Ineos Britannia boat currently leads Italy’s Luna Rosso 6-4 in the Louis Vuitton Cup final and could secure the right to challenge New Zealand in the America’s Cup today. If Italy wins both of the day’s races, then a decider would be held tomorrow.

So far the action has been thrillingly close; the lead chopping and changing regularly in races. The fourth heat of the final saw Luna Rosso beat Ineos Britannia by just four seconds to level the score 2-2. The teams couldn’t be split over the following two days of racing either, taking two wins apiece over tight and tactical heats, as well as one easy win for Ineos after the Italians’ boat was damaged.

But Ineos managed to pull out its advantage in rough seas on Wednesday, taking an early lead in both races and maintaining that advantage, albeit by only nine seconds in the second race of the day.

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Both teams are thought to have spent in the region of £100m on the campaign, with the distinctive hydrofoils taking a significant chunk of that investment.

“These are very large steel parts and they’re quite intricate,” says Bernasconi. “They take a lot of machining.”

The design of these foils, and the hulls, have been shaped by painstaking desktop research. Wind tunnels are not used as the scale of the boats would have to be too small — 10% — to fit them in. Instead, designers make heavy use of computational fluid dynamics (CFD), which is how F1 teams do most of their aero simulations too.

There’s added complexity when designing a craft, as the ‘track’ is far more changeable. “In F1, you can get a driver to do three laps with one wing setting, change it and send him out again and compare,” says Bernasconi. “You can’t do that in sailing because the sea will be different and the wind will be different. So we make pretty much all of those performance decisions through simulation.”

On the water, the sailing crews work the boat with the well-honed co-ordination of an F1 pitcrew; some providing the power to raise and trim the sails; others steering and controlling the sail shapes.

Watch today’s racing live on this page, and read our latest issue for the full story of the cutting-edge tech behind the exhilarating racing that is F1 on water.

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