SANITY CHECK

As each of the new AC75s were wheeled out into the open for the first time, amid the celebration and champagne spraying, each team will have been keenly aware that this was it. Barring disasters, these were the boats that would face each other on the start line. After more than two years of planning, scheming, datacrunching, building, testing and training, this was their shot at the America’s Cup.

The pressure has been made even greater by the lack of any opportunity to compare themselves against the other teams, after the two 2020 AC World Series events in Sardinia and Portsmouth fell victim to the pandemic. Had they gone ahead, these regattas would have provided valuable intelligence about the relative performance differences across the fleet, and some clues about which design approach was pursuing the right path. Much of that knowledge would have been gained while there was still time to do something about it. Now there is none.

The result is that, despite all the ‘competitive reconnaissance’ – or what you and I would call spying – that every team has been engaged in since the 36th Cup cycle started, rarely has so little been known by the competitors about their opponents.

But this hasn’t stopped others from speculating. Before the launches, there was a school of thought that, despite some wildly different design approaches for the first boats, the second AC75s might show the four designers’ thinking had shifted towards a similar corner of the rule. But when the new boats were unveiled it was clear that such