British America’s Cup Syndicate waves farewell to Palma after successful winter training period

Written by Justin Chisholm

When INEOS Britannia looked around for a winter base for its training, testing and development programme ahead of the 37th edition of yachting racing’s oldest and most prestigious competition, Palma Bay stood out clearly as the best option on several counts.

The UK team – headed by sailing’s most successful Olympic sailor, British yachtsman Sir Ben Ainslie and backed by British billionaire businessman Sir Jim Ratcliffe – arrived on the island in September last year and by October were up and running from a highly secure temporary facility inside the gates of the Port of Palma’s ferry and cruise ship terminal adjacent to Porta Pi’s Dic de l’Oest lighthouse.

“We chose Palma because of the weather conditions we knew we could expect here,” commented Ainslie. “We believed Palma Bay offered the best chance of maximising our sailing days over the winter months.”

With a core staff on site of around 60 people – including sailors, designers, sailmakers, boatbuilders, mechatronics and hydraulics engineers, as well as electronics specialists and data analysts – the team would swell to over 100 at key times.

Many of the designers and specialist technical staff working on the project came from INEOS Britannia’s close partnership with the Mercedes AMG Formula 1 motor racing team based in Brackley, England.

With the rules for the 37th America’s Cup – to be held on the waters off Barcelona, Spain in the Autumn of 2024 – dictating that the competing teams can only build one 75-foot AC75 foiling monohull raceboat, the British made the strategic decision to first build a smaller 40-foot boat for testing and development purposes.

This type of scaled down test boat is known in America’s Cup parlance as an ‘LEQ12’ (standing for Less or EQual to 12 metres) with the British christening theirs as Britannia at a private launch ceremony at the team’s base in October 2022.

With its slick silver/grey paint job and prominent INEOS Britannia branding on the hull and black carbon sails, Britannia was easy to spot sailing out on Palma Bay. But if onlookers were hoping to glean some idea from her hull shape as to what the team’s yet-to-be-built full-size AC75 might look like, they would have been sadly disappointed.

“Britannia’s principal function is as a testing and data gathering platform so that we can validate the software design tools that we will use to design our full size AC75,” Ainslie explained on the boat’s launch day.

To facilitate this critical data gathering process Britannia simply bristled with multitudes of sensors and cameras above and below the waterline, as well as some highly complex computing systems hidden below deck.

Every day the team went sailing, the boat – sailed by four crew (two helmsmen and two sail trimmers / flight controllers) in crash helmets and specially designed goggles – would generate multiple terabytes of data, later to be pored over and analysed by the experts in Palma and Brackley.

Palma Bay’s (mostly) regular midday thermal sea breeze enabled them to maximise their data gathering time aboard their LEQ12 test boat and the INEOS Britannia sailors frequently made the expanses of Palma Bay look small as they clocked 80 - 100 nautical miles per day at top speeds of around 50 knots – remarkably, often in no more than 10 knots of breeze.

INEOS Britannia’s final sailing day in Palma took place on June 17 after which the team set about decamping to Barcelona where, from August 1 – alongside the other challenging teams from France, Italy, Switzerland, the United States, as well as the America’s Cup holders from New Zealand – the Great Britain team is to be based for the rest of its preparations for next year’s Cup competition.