Oracle Team USA’s Boat 2 Arrives In Bermuda
America’s Cup defending champion Oracle Team USA received a special delivery recently when boat two arrived in Bermuda.
The second AC45T [the T being for Turbo, or Test, or Terribly fast] is a test platform the team is using as it develops its design for the new America’s Cup Class boat it will race in 2017.
The boat arrived broken down into its component parts in two shipping containers last week and has already been unpacked and had the hulls painted. Assembling the parts together is fairly straightforward, but there is still a lot of work to do in building up the systems on the boat that control the wing and foils.
“The boat has been assembled already in New Zealand, so it’s a matter of being able to set it up in its cradle and re-assemble it. That’s the easy bit; that will take a few hours,” said Mark Turner, who heads up boatbuilding for Oracle Team USA and has overseen he construction of the last two boats to win the America’s Cup.
“But the systems still need to be set up. There’s a lot of work that still needs to happen there so this boat is scheduled to be delivered to the sailing team in about a month’s time.”
In parallel, work is ongoing with modifications to boat one, which is being upgraded to more closely match the configuration of the second boat. One of the major changes is to add a second grinding pedestal to each side of the boat, increasing the physical demands on the sailors and more closely mimicking the America’s Cup Class boat for 2017.
“Boat one will be ready just after the guys get back from Gothenburg at the beginning of September,” Turner says.
This is the next stage in the Oracle Team USA development program with designers, sailors, shore team and boat builders all involved in coming up with the best solutions to improve performance on the water.
- Photos courtesy of Mike Herbener / Oracle Team USA
