On board the Land Rover BAR America’s Cup boat

It’s an AC45F foiling catamaran. I know, it looks bananas doesn’t it? It’s the cutting edge of sailing technology, has a wing instead of a mainsail and can climb up out of the water to reduce drag and increase speed, surfing on a wing-profile foil.

It’s 45 feet long, the mast is 70 feet tall and it weighs just 1320kg, so it's lighter than a Golf GTI. It’s constructed entirely of carbon fibre.

These are the boats that are contesting the Louis Vuitton America’s Cup World Series. At this point some explanation is probably required, because this isn’t that straightforward.

The America’s Cup is the world’s oldest sporting trophy. The British invented it back in 1851, had a race around the Isle of Wight to which one American boat turned up (the aptly named schooner, America), won, and took the trophy home. There it has mostly stayed ever since. So despite inventing the event, we have never won it.

Well done us. Anyway, back in 2013 the racing was held in San Francisco Bay and it was an almighty spectacle: foiling (literally planning above the water on a single L-shaped winglet) had only just been invented and the boats were huge 72ft catamarans. America was losing 1-8 to New Zealand, when they had a change of plan and brought Sir Ben Ainslie, holder of four Olympic gold medals, on as their tactician. They ended up winning 9-8.

Unsurprisingly Ben would rather win for Britain than America, so he came home and set up Ben Ainslie Racing with the express aim of winning the America’s Cup.

Land Rover came on board as title sponsors and is providing technical help and assistance, while Adrian Newey and Red Bull Advanced Technologies are involved in the design of the new boat. Still not enough cutting edge car involvement for you? BAR’s CEO is Martin Whitmarsh, who used to run McLaren’s F1 team.

But you can’t just turn up and compete in the America’s Cup. As you might expect in a competition that dates back over 160 years there are some arcane rules…

The defender gets to choose the venue and the type of boats that are sailed there. And there is only one challenger permitted.

So the Louis Vuitton America’s Cup World Series is sorting out who will have the right to go up against America at their chosen race location in Bermuda next June. I’m not sure why America is competing in this other than to stay match fit and keep an eye on their rivals, but it could well be part of the rules and regs. Anyway, up against them and the Land Rover BAR squad are teams from New Zealand, Japan, France and Sweden.

They race, they earn points and at the end of the series the winner earns the right to compete against America. The losers, I assume, earn the right to tear up the drawings and plans of the boats they were hoping to build.

That’s because these aren’t the race boats they’ll be using for the America’s Cup next June. To maintain a level playing field at the moment they’re using these AC45Fs I spoke about earlier. Come next summer they’ll be racing bespoke ACC (America’s Cup Class) craft.

There are parameters: they’ll be just under 50ft long, 27.8ft wide, have a 78.6ft mast and weigh 2400kg. They’ll also have hydraulic control. After that, the design, technology and engineering is up to each team. Which is where Land Rover and Newey/Red Bull Advanced Technologies come in.

At the moment anything Newey is up to is strictly secret, but Land Rover is already helping out – JLR has a vast engineering department so has lent a few engineers to BAR full time, plus allowed them access to their resources, wind tunnel etc to speed up the development process.

Anyway, that’s all for the future – there’s an amazing tech story to come out of Land Rover BAR at some stage. Last weekend the racing was in Portsmouth, spread over Saturday and Sunday with three short races on each day. Each race lasts about 20 minutes and for one of them – the last on Saturday – I got to be ballast.

That’s because in addition to five crew (who must weigh no more than 87.5kg on average), each boat has to carry a ‘guest sailor’. I have done a bit of sailing in the past, but NOTHING like this. But then there was nothing for me to foul up anyway.

That’s me, sat on the back. Literally 77kg of ballast. As ‘guest sailor’ my exact job was to sit down, shut up and hold on. We were briefed on this beforehand by an ex-Marine who also told us exactly where to hold on. And the consequences of what would happen if we didn’t. This included being hit by the tonne of carbon likely to be following close behind.

You see that white rope in front of me? That carries up to two tonnes of load – it trims the wing. You don’t touch that. You see the black carbon bar that runs behind my neck? That’s the tiller that Ben steers with. You don’t touch that either.

What’s it like when things get going? Astonishing. Unbelieveable. Like no sailing I’ve ever done before. I found myself hooting with laughter. For starters the acceleration is amazing. The wing delivers the same equivalent lift/thrust/whatever as the wing of a commercial jet, so when the wind works across it properly, it just flies. Quite literally if the wind speed is over about 10-12 knots (roughly 12-14mph – you multiply by 1.15 to get the mph).

Unfortunately the wind speed was just too low for us to get foiling on Saturday, but the incredible thing about these boats is that they can run at more than double the speed of the wind – so eight knots of wind speed was yielding close to 20 knots of boat speed.

At that velocity one hull is several feet out of the water and there are a lot of alarming cracks, creaks and groans coming from the boat. But the racing is fantastic and my view, sat right on the back of the boat, takes in scampering sailors, whipping lines and other boats very, very close by. All big, all moving at 20 knots and all full of scampering sailors, shouted commands and a snake pit of ropes.

Until the mix sorts itself out (we won the race I was on board for), the racing is as close as F1. At the start there’s a tremendous battle for position and at one point the bow of the French ship’s elevated hull practically swept above me. It’s breath-taking stuff, the boat is enormously responsive, turns sharper than a speedboat and really, detectably, accelerates out of corners.

I’ve always seen sailing as a bit pedestrian, mainly because the stuff I’ve done before has mainly been pottering about on dinghies, but this was fast and aggressive, the whole spectacle magnified due to the size of the boats and the speed with which they react. Being sat in the midst of the whole thing was a massive privilege and when I got out, my fingers were white from gripping on so hard...