A dream not inspired by a 1.2 litre wheezer

RNZYS Members enjoy a day ashore on the golf course

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Some tacked, some gybed, others opted for short hops, a select few chose to follow the rhumbline, none required life jackets – and they all got there in the end.

The 36 Degrees Brokers RNZYS Golf Day at the Gulf Harbour Country Club was a great success and the jury ruled that all protests were invalid.

1/ Bolle/Musto with hole sponsors PIC Insurance (L-R) Briar Rogers (PIC), Sam Jasper, Scott Campbell, George Hendy, Robb Baird (Winners) and Isaiah Stowers (PIC). 2/ Milne/Cleave (L-R) Robert Salthouse, Ross Lornie, Jonathan Milne and Richard Cleave. 3/ 36 Degrees Brokers (L-R) Blair McNaughton, Bill Young, Adam Wrightson and Sarah Gair. 4/ Pernod Ricard team (L–R) Scott Taylor, Trent Orange, Paul Douglas and Nate Ratima. 5/ Yacht Collective (L-R) Andrew Delves Harry Clark, Dave Hookey and Dan Dalton. 6/ Barfoot & Thompson crew (L-R) Chris Dobbie, Bill Humphrey, Russell O’Brien and Peter Thompson. 7/ Milford Asset Management team (L-R) Arthur Caughley, Bruce O’Leary, Richard Pilley and David Holt. 8/ Teams gather for the pre-match briefing. 9/ Conrad and Sarah Gair from 36° Brokers with RNZYS CEO Hayden Porter. Photos by Debbie Whiting

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A dream not inspired by a 1.2 litre wheezer

By Ivor Wilkins When Emirates Team New Zealand’s engineers were tasked with producing a vehicle to break the world wind-powered land speed record, it is a pretty safe bet that a 1.2 litre Mitsubishi Mirage GT was not a prime source of inspiration.

Describing its performance, an autoguide.com review spoke of the engine’s jackhammer vibrations as it struggled for every single km/h and warned that the 225km maximum mark on the Mitsubishi speedometer was “hopelessly optimistic”. Acceleration was described as “so slow you get passed by pedestrians walking in the opposite direction”.

Another online motorcar guide gives the Mitsubishi a “theoretical top speed” of 175km/h. One presumes the “GT” badge was also hopelessly optimistic, or at least wildly ironic.

Why is this relevant to the land speed aspirations of ETNZ? Because, in the relevant wind range of 25-30 knots, the machine they are building for a tilt at the 202.9km/h record set 13 years ago generates an estimated 80hp. The Mitsubishi on its best day produces 78hp and would need to be going down a steep hill with a following wind to achieve the target speed.

When British engineer Richard Jenkins set the record on a dry lake in California in March 2009, he talked about the challenge of achieving the goal with relatively low power.

“It is an incredibly difficult record to break,” he said. “I have been trying for 10 years, every year, all day, every day.

“Any other record, more power means more speed. Here we do not have more power. More wind doesn’t mean more speed. You have to get it technically spot on,” he said of the constant battle to find the sweet spot in a web of competing forces – lift versus drag, tyre pressures, rolling resistance, weight distribution.

ETNZ design chief Dan Bernasconi nods sagely. “It is quite ambitious,” he concedes, “but it is a really cool project.” Indeed, there is a buzz around this adventure that is generating much excitement inside and beyond the team.

It is not only intellectually stimulating, taking the accumulated expertise of its design and engineering group into new areas of discovery – tyres, wheels and suspension are a new and major preoccupation. It also highlights that ETNZ has expanded its horizons beyond the single focus of an America’s Cup sailing team to become a technology company.

Sir Stephen Tindall alluded to this back in 2020 at the launch ceremony of ETNZ’s new AC75 foiling monohull. “As an investor in about 200 technology companies, I see just what this little country is capable of,” said the entrepreneur, who was chairman of the ETNZ board at that time. “I recognise that Team New Zealand, along with Rocketlab, is right at the top in terms of innovation and incredible high-tech engineering.”

Chief Operating Officer Kevin Shoebridge traces this expansion of purpose back to the Valencia America’s Cup of 2007. “Historically, America’s Cup teams came together and worked like crazy for three years on a single campaign and then split up.

“Ever since Valencia, we have tried to keep running non-stop, which has never really happened before. We have tried to hang on to our people, our intellectual property and knowledge.”

That continuity has not only strengthened the team as an America’s Cup fighting unit, but also built up a significant repository of high-tech skills across a range of specialist fields, including an in-house custom manufacturing facility.

“A lot has changed since Valencia,” says Shoebridge. “It is a numbers game now, much more science-based than it has ever been. If you look at the size and make-up of design teams now, it is completely different. They come from all kinds of highly specialised areas. It is fascinating sitting in on some of their meetings, although,” he adds with a rueful smile, “it is also easy to get lost.”

The nature of America’s Cup cycles presents peaks of intense 24/7 activity followed by valleys of relative quiet time. The challenge is to smooth the curve and pay the salary bill by outsourcing those skills and capabilities during the lulls.

“We have to keep things going in between,” Shoebridge nods, “not only for financial reasons, but also to keep our people developing as well. It is good to have diversity and to be involved in a range of different projects.

“It exposes us to new skills, new design tools. We don’t see these outside projects as dead time. We see it as development time.

“At the same time, we are always conscious of not taking our eye off the ball and next thing we are not ready for the Cup. We are pretty

Emirates Team New Zealand cautious. It is a softly-softly approach of taking on other projects, but never demonstrates its credentials as a forgetting the main game.” sophisticated technology company Much of the external work the team takes on flies under the radar, but some examples include consulting on foiling passenger ferries, rowing skiffs, Olympic kayaks, custom components for race yachts and superyachts as well as foils and appendages for the fleet of one-design AC40 foiling monohulls, along with other non-marine projects. There have also been enquiries about building race yachts for external clients, which the team has not been able to accommodate to date, but Shoebridge definitely sees building TP52s and the like in future. But unquestionably the two endeavours drawing most attention are the land speed record and the hydrogen-powered chase boats mandated for adoption by all the teams in the 37th America’s Cup Protocol, both of which were expected to be trialling in April and May, Covid and supply-chain issues permitting. Externally-funded, the land speed record attempt plays into the passions of wing-trimmer and multiple sailing world champion Glenn Ashby, who spends his leisure time on hair-raising off-road motorbiking adventures. He has ridden a motorbike at more than 300km/h. Ashby has dreamed of setting a wind-powered land speed record since he was a 10-year-old boy growing up in Bendigo, Australia. At last, his chance will come when he pilots the ETNZ craft across a salt pan in the South Australian desert around the middle of the year. Team CEO Grant Dalton is also a speed freak, who has mixed it up in high-octane saloon car racing and has raced motorbikes several times

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Glenn Ashby scouting South Australian locations for the ETNZ wind-powered land speed record attempt.

at the notorious Isle of Man TT Race, surviving a 160km/h crash in the process.

“The wind powered land speed record is something I have always been interested in,” says Dalton. “In bringing a design challenge like this into ETNZ, I knew it would be beneficial on a number of fronts to keep the technicians and the innovators of the organisation engaged during a down-time with new, complex technical issues to solve with a cool project.”

Under the NALSA rules governing the attempt, the record is not a timed run over a fixed distance. It is the highest average speed measured over a 3-second period.

In addressing the challenge, Bernasconi says the initial approach was to start with a clean-sheet, which examined a number of concepts and configurations. Eventually, however, the search brought them back to Richard Jenkins’ Greenbird design, which is basically a long cylindrical fuselage supporting a high aspect ratio wing and balanced by an outrigger lever arm projecting at 90° to the fuselage. In the ETNZ version, the outrigger arm carries a ton of ballast to provide righting moment.

All the existing yacht design tools of computational fluid dynamics (CFD), finite element analysis (FEA), even velocity prediction programs (VPP) transferred to the land yacht project, while the high-aspect-ratio wing is a simplified version of the Cup wings used on the 2013 and 2017 catamarans.

While yacht wings have to go through a wide range of shapes and cambers to transition from displacement to foiling modes, Bernasconi says a land speed yacht only has to target a single condition.

“You don’t care about how long it takes to accelerate. You just have to be really efficient at one point. Glenn will only have trim tab adjustment to control the wing. It is all very mechanical and a lot more about bits of string and levers than complex hydraulics and PLC controls.”

Like the Greenbird attempt, the design is targeted at a wind range between 25 and 30 knots. “In theory, if you targeted higher windspeeds, you would achieve higher speeds, but you need to balance that against the stability of the breeze. If you went somewhere blowing at 40 knots, it is likely the wind will be very gusty, which makes management very difficult.

“Ultimately what is limiting you is not the windspeed alone, but the efficiency. The things holding you back are the sources of drag: the rolling resistance of the tyres, the aerodynamic drag of the platform and the induced drag of the wing.

“If you had no drag, you would go infinitely fast in 5 knots of breeze, but you can never totally eliminate those sources of drag. You can only work to be as efficient as possible by reducing drag.”

Which brings us back to the limitations of the wheezing 78hp

Mitsubishi Mirage GT. Except, the land yacht actually faces added complications. The Mitsubishi would be entitled to have a crack in calm conditions and steer a dead straight line. The land yacht has to counter much higher apparent winds and resist considerable sideforce.

Without a dagger board and rudder, it is up to the tyres to resist leeway, which has them constantly fighting for grip, as if they are always going round corners. “You are losing energy in the process. You have to find a balance between resisting distortion while limiting rolling resistance from excessive contact area.”

Specialist Goodyear tyres with a speed rating of 480km/h that are typically used by salt flat race cars and record attempts running “rock hard” at a minimum 70psi inflation will be used.

Guillaume Verdier describes the land yacht project as compelling for all involved, with the increased speeds raising the complexities of the design and engineering challenge, but also providing lessons for the next generation AC75s.

THE COMPLEXITIES OF producing a hydrogen-powered chase boat have also challenged the design and engineering resources of the team. This project was introduced to the Protocol for the next America’s Cup as part of a drive to showcase and utilise clean energy.

To meet the brief for a vessel capable of carrying six passengers at a top speed of 50 knots with a range between 150-180km, the team has produced a futuristic 10m foiling catamaran, displacing 5200kg fully loaded.

A purely electric system was looked at, but quickly ruled out. “It would actually be easier to achieve 50 knots on batteries alone,” says Bernasconi, “but the range would be very limited. Hydrogen gives you range.”

Their prototype is powered by two Toyota hydrogen fuel cells, which deliver electricity to a 400V DC system generating approximately 440kW of peak power.

“This was a clean-sheet project,” says Bernasconi. “There is very little out there to draw from. The approach started with the power train, not the hull shapes. We started by looking at what components you need to pull together to achieve the target requirements.

“Then it was a matter of looking at the weight you need to carry, what drag that would create, how much power you would need, how much hydrogen, the cooling systems and battery banks. These are all quite large components. Then we designed the shape of the boat around those systems.”

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