INEOS Britannia, the British Challenger of Record racing for the Royal Yacht Squadron Ltd in the 37th America’s Cup, has christened and launched its AC75 race boat “Britannia” in Barcelona.
The event was led by INEOS Chairman Sir Jim Ratcliffe, and INEOS Britannia CEO and Skipper Sir Ben Ainslie, who both appeared to be much more relaxed at this launch than they had at the launch of the first Britannia back in October 2020.
That ill-fated RB2 design was down to the then in house Ineos Britannia Chief Designer and his team . . . This latest iteration of the AC75, the version that will be the official British AC37 challenger, is derived from the combination of two very different sports cultures.
It is the product of an integrated joint program between Mercedes-AMG Petronas F1 Team, whose Applied Science division helped design and develop Britannia and the Ineos Britannia design team.
Geoffrey Willis, Chief Technical Director summed-up the day . . .
It’s three years, a thousand days of work by a very dedicated team of people and it’s also it’s interesting on this occasion it’s been a sort of 50/50 combination of marine designers and engineers, and Formula 1 designers and engineers and of course that Formula 1 team that we tap into has a thousand engineers and designers.
So it’s really intriguing to see what the combination of those two sets of competences has produced, but we don’t really know yet how it will [perform].
I think Ben’s got more of a smile on his face than a grimace at the moment, but we don’t truly know how fast this boat’s going to be, but I’ve always said about the America’s Cup it’s the sport with the most Jeopardy in it.
And you know this is real Jeopardy here. We’ve got this massive Cray computer that’s designed this boat but we don’t know whether the boat’s going to do what the computer said it will do . . . and then of course there’s more Jeopardy because even if it does what the computer said it would do, and if it does that [it] would be very exciting for this team.
We don’t know what the other teams have done of course until we actually match it up against them so very exciting day really all around.
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