37th America’s Cup Protocol announced

[dunedin]

Official announcement of the Protocol and Class Rule of the 37th America's Cup

Seems to be very little excitement about this - not helped by the continuing political wrangling and delayed over announcement of the venue (Cork might be nice).

 

[Wing Mark]

I might raise my AC37 excitement level to 'makes a change from watching kids race Toppers' a couple of hours before it starts.
Maybe.

 

[bedouin]

Oh dear - it is beginning to sound like F1 in its attempts to level the playing field between the rich and poor.

While a very laudable objective it does make the whole thing a bit of a lottery as you have to make too many guesses and if you get it wrong you can't catch up. I think it would have been much better to go to more one design elements - e.g. at least start off with a common set of foils available to all rather than every team having to start from scratch

 

[Minerva]

America's cup - the only ones who win with the cup are the litigation Lawyers. Would be quite happy to see the cup fall into obscurity and irrelevance.

The world match racing tour on the other hand is far more interesting to watch, has a better format (imo) and significantly better racing.

 

[dunedin]

America's cup - the only ones who win with the cup are the litigation Lawyers. Would be quite happy to see the cup fall into obscurity and irrelevance.

The world match racing tour on the other hand is far more interesting to watch, has a better format (imo) and significantly better racing.

Agree. SailGP with the previous generation cats and more teams involved seems a better alternative than the official AC.

 

[flaming]

The world match racing tour on the other hand is far more interesting to watch, has a better format (imo) and significantly better racing.

I think if you're watching the AC for the quality of the racing, then you're slightly missing the point... It's only superficially a sailing competition, it's mostly a design competition. Which is both its biggest strength, the whole "what will they have come up with this time?" and the anticipation of the first lineup before we know who's boat is faster...
Think back to the last cup, and arguably the most interesting part of it was the amateur analysis of the different foil and sail packages.

And it's biggest weakness, in that the actual broadcastable product can be somewhat dull, despite attempts to make it less so.

The protocol, at first scan, throws up some interesting bits, some bits I really like, and some things that are a bit odd.

The most interesting bit is undoubtedly the new AC40. This has 2 purposes, as an OD race boat for the youth and Women's cup, and also as the defined test mule for the teams. This is, I think, really clever. By allowing the teams only to build one full sized boat, then clearly they were going to build some sort of test mule, as they did last time round, to test developments in their foils and sail handling etc. Those mules last time out basically hold the record for the fastest racing boats never to have actually sailed any races, so the idea of dual purposing them as test mules and OD race boats... Like it. It also has the side benefit of ensuring that testing results that the teams get are more directly comparable by we who are watching... (And the teams too...) And with everyone using the same mule, it more likely that designs will converge, not diverge, as they should get similar results from their trials.
The bit I really like is the 1 hull, and the attempts to make it easier for new teams to enter the fray.

The bit that I find odd is that having defined the youth and women's cups they didn't include them in the CSS points series. That would have sent a huge message to the teams to take them seriously, if your youth and women's teams were scoring actual points, int he way that the "full" team will in the preliminaries.

Nothing would develop talent better than the teams having actual skin in the game on the result of the Women's cup.

 

[Wing Mark]

While the home team is sponsored by the Emirates, we're lucky there's women's event at all.