Lightning and Boat Drops Add Extra Excitement to America’s Cup Racing

Excitement off and above the water is running neck and neck with the action on the water, as Round Robin races for the 37th America’s Cup presented by Louis Vuitton enter their second week. It will be a brutal end for one of the challenging teams in Barcelona, Catalonia, as one will be sent home by this weekend. Right now, Red Bull Alinghi from Switzerland and France’s Orient Express Racing are on the precipice, but neither American Magic nor INEOS Brittannia is safe yet, as only Luna Rossa Prada Pirelli (LRPP) has cleared the bar with a potential number-one seed for the Semi-Finals.

The action at times has been excruciatingly lackluster as the AC75s still struggle to hop up onto their foils when the wind conditions hover just over the bare minimum at 6.5 knots. We’ve seen this picture before!

So far LRPP has looked strong with Jimmy Spithill and Francesco Bruni “twin-helming,” as all the teams have now copied and pasted the Italians’ technology and ingenuity from 2021. It hasn’t been all cake and ice cream for New Zealand though, as first their boat was dropped more than six feet when the crane failed and Taihoro crashed into its lift with the foil arms hitting the pavement.

“Clearly this was a setback for the team at such an important time of the campaign,” Team CEO Grant Dalton said. “These are the moments that can define an America’s Cup campaign, and we have an amazing group of dedicated and talented people who will be working around the clock on getting the boat repaired.”

Which it was in short order — in just over a day in an amazing display of the ETNZ’s ground-support crew, Taihoro was on the racecourse against Patriot 2.0, barely missing a beat!

“I thought we had finally figured out our first shift to get the lead, but it kept going left up that first beat. You don’t want to be behind, but nice to get an overtake (of the Americans) as well,” skipper Peter Burling said. “The boat feels great, exactly like we left it. We are all incredibly fortunate how little damage there actually was. We are just really lucky with where the impact was and that the cradle took a lot of the impact.”

The following video covers the tech. team’s all-nighter to get Taihoro back into racing condition.

Then in the first day of RR 2 in a “holy shit and it’s not worth it” déjà vu moment, lightning, which had been in the area for most of the day, hit the racecourse with a massive strike in a race between the Kiwis and Italians. Burling immediately turned the boat and headed toward safety, abandoning the race.

“We’ve got some bad memories from Singapore,” Burling said. “I think in general, the people would be OK, but the carbon structure gets hurt, the mast would be in really bad shape, and all the electronics.

“I was more than keen to get close to one of these big yachts which are ducted down to the water properly because there are a lot of electronics on these boats. When you see lightning strike on the racecourse it is never fun, put it that way,’ he added.

Their SailGP F50, which is also helmed and flown by Burling and Blair Tuke, was struck by lightning after racing in Singapore last year, frying the electronics and forcing New Zealand to wait for a new boat!

Watch as the “holy shit” moment unfolds on the water.

The sole American entry, representing the New York Yacht Club, was inconsistent at best and at worst could be on their way back if they don’t step up their game. They have beaten the Kiwis once, but are 0-2 against Italy so far.

“We had a really good first lap; we were behind on the first cross (against ETNZ) and then got back and got them at the top mark,” said skipper Tom Slingsby, starboard helm on NYYC American Magic. “We had a nice run and led them around the bottom mark, which was nice, and then, during the second beat, it felt like they were potentially maneuvering a bit better than us. We tried matching them a couple of times, and then they seemed to be closing in on us, and my hands are up; I decided to say, ‘Look, we’re bleeding here; let’s let them go and just concentrate on ourselves and try to pick the shifts,’ and I chose the wrong time to do that.”

In the Defender “friendly” AC Protocol, ETNZ is allowed to compete in the Round Robins, but the races “don’t count.”

“If there’s a time to be inconsistent, it’s now, because we have to keep looking forward, push forward, and ask ourselves hard questions. And we can’t sweep anything under the rug,” said Terry Hutchinson, American Magic’s executive president of operations.

Racing was postponed for a second time today for Patriot 2.0’s critical matchup with the Brits and later the Swiss, in what will be a make-or-break day when racing resumes tomorrow at 5 a.m. PST.

Is that too late for a cocktail or too early for coffee?