End of a long day for the INEOS Britannia team after their 05:15 dawn rollout.
Most of the day was spent getting the mast installed and rigged. The rig was installed, but then lowered at 08:30, some works carried out and new strops fitted. The rig was stepped again at 12:20 and work continued above and below deck until the late evening. The mast was still up by 20:00 in the evening.
This latest video showed more of the hull, but still no deck images were revealed.
The Recon report described the hull thus . . . The plumb bow starts sharp and maintains a steep deadrise towards the forward cradle, flaring out to a flat bottom from foil arm pivots.
A noticeable bustle starts off in a bulbous form, with a small chine about 1m from the bow, leading back along the keel-line, continuing to the transom, tapering off towards the stern. A thin skeg runs along the keel-line to a razor-sharp vertical cut-off a few meters before the rudder housing.
The rudder mechanics are thus above deck in a beautifully sculpted stern gantry that screams Formula 1 design.
The sheerline raises from the bow and the flat deck continues to the sidepods. The sidepods start behind the foil cant arms, containing 4 crew pods in line on each side, separated with a trench deck approximately one foot deep.
The trench runs flat down the middle to the transom, with a gentle flare to meet the sidepods. The sidepods taper towards to the thin transom, maintaining flat topsides and the sheerline in a straight line down. The topsides meet the flat bottom at a 90 degree angle.
No real detail available of the mainsheet system yet.
The traveller sits in a cut out below deck where a sheave can be seen connected to the end of the mainsheet actuator, with two mainsail skin clew actuators on either side (not connected to each other).
The foils were shrouded below the one design foil cant arms. The leading edge of the foil recedes slightly from the one design section and continues to the front of the torpedo bulb.
The high aspect wings connect aft of the bulb, slightly anhedral, with pronounced wingtips. The Brits look to have gone straight for Version 1 of their foil allowance. The starboard wingtips had boxes over them, perhaps with camera bulbs on them as on ARBR Boat One. Towards the end of the day, the shrouding fell slightly, revealing seemingly unfinished paint work.
America’s Cup pundit Magnus Wheatley was of the opinion that the British programme to the Louis Vuitton 37thAmerica’s Cup took a giant leap forward today with the fusion of outstanding naval architect Martin Fischer and the Mercedes Applied Science team in Brackley.
And had produced something very special here and with an experienced team of America’s Cup sailors, hopes are high and getting higher that at long last Britain has the design that is capable of going deep into the competition with a shot at winning the Auld Mug.
Such a comment will be music to the ears of Jim Ratcliffe, who is bank-rolling the British team. Back in October 2021 he laid it on the line . . . “I don’t think the Brits have ever arrived at the Cup with a boat that could have won. Our boat we had for AC36 wasn’t good enough. It wasn’t capable of winning.”
This was no great secret but had been something that was regularly skated over by both the British AC teams and the various sailing pundits, even after it became painfully obvious . . . once again.
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