For Mike Buckley, a strategist of the United States SailGP Team, the learning experience of jumping into a racing catamaran at midseason was “like drinking from a fire hose.”
He’s putting it mildly.
Now, everything and nothing has changed as Buckley’s team rushes toward its first full SailGP season that begins next month in Dubai. Progress has been achieved. Lessons have been learned. But they’re still a new unit under new ownership with not much of an off-season. There was, instead, a training session in Bermuda with a league-supplied boat — shared with the Danish team — and simulator time and stress-test physical development.
Buckley and a consortium of investors bought the U.S. team in November, just before last season’s race in Dubai to build around its driver, Taylor Canfield, a world champion match racer who entered SailGP with the typical steep learning curve. A new team of players was brought in after the sale.
With the giant steps of raw newcomers behind them, Buckley said, “There are no aha moments. We can do everything we need to do on the boat. Now we need to get a fraction of a second better at every little thing.”
SailGP, like the America’s Cup, is very data-driven. But each Cup boat is different. Secrecy is paramount. In SailGP the boats are identical. Teams make the difference, not the boats, and SailGP is unique in collecting massive streams of data and sharing all of it equally.
This is not seat-of-the-pants sailing. A team’s ability to get around the course is only the beginning. Then comes putting into practice the insights gathered from simulator training, data analysis and visualization. Each team decides what is useful. When the real world merges with the virtual, a team is competitive.
“Two degrees in the angle of the rudders can make a difference,” Buckley said. Ride height is critical. Acute awareness comes from data. Looking at a winning team’s turning rate through maneuvers might tell a new team to try it faster or slower.
Wing shape is an example. Compared with a fabric sail that can be reshaped for different winds — to a limited degree, by stretching or loosening three points of attachment — SailGP wings have many internal moving parts, far more than an airplane wing with its external flaps. They can be set to any desired shape. When wings first appeared on raceboats, the first lesson learned was to forget the eyeball lessons you learned as a junior sailor.
“Data helps the wing trimmers understand this new way of shaping power,” the SailGP data analyst David Rey said. “They can measure how much input is needed on each control and how to coordinate them. We help by creating statistics, reports and data overlays on videos.”
Time on the water is partly limited by how long it takes to ship, set up and break down between venues. Time on the water is king, but time in a simulator comes right behind.
Like other principals of SailGP, Warren Jones, the director of technology, came out of Oracle racing’s failed America’s Cup defense of 2017. SailGP went straight into standardizing its early F50 catamarans from boats left over from the Cup. Jones said he fully expected SailGP to succeed, but never imagined the wealth of technology now at his fingertips. As the maestro of simulators, he said, “We have data for all the races we’ve ever run, every venue, every leg.”
In SailGP’s simulators, an athlete can experience winning the start of race one in Cádiz, Spain, and see how it happened; rinse and repeat. Or what went wrong on a losing boat. Or perhaps see who was fastest on leg two of the 2024 finale in San Francisco and what they did to build that speed.
“Sailors can place themselves in the middle of any scenario, and it’s up to them to process that and put it to use,” Jones said. “But they’re not like Formula 1 drivers looking for time around a track. Sailors don’t want to simulate a whole race straight through. They want to practice umpteen starts or umpteen turns and drill down on the details.”
Simulators take several forms. The simplest is a sailor facing a computer screen. One level up, a driver can take a wheel that duplicates one on the boat and connect it to a personal computer. The wheel has five control buttons that make it much more than a steering wheel, and all five are devoted to the angles of the two rudders, one on each hull.
On the side the wind is coming from and pushing, trying to tip the boat over, the angle will be set to hold that hull down. The other rudder, on the side being pushed down, is set to lift. The various buttons add or reduce differential at different rates. For more wind, more differential. Hitting a big gust? Fast change. Dancing your way through fickle, variable light winds? Go for subtle changes.
And because you’re not busy, be sure to hit the correct button. The wheel also has a dial for adjusting the rake of the main foils, making the driver a partner in controlling the ride height, and did we mention steering the boat?
Next in simulator sophistication comes a three-person unit, a platform sized to loosely mimic a real boat. It has two half hulls and stations for the wing trimmer and the flight controller (tasked with the principal duty of keeping the boat at the right height above the water). Computer screens afford a 180-degree view. That package will travel with the 2024-25 circuit. A permanently located simulator is in the works.
Just hanging onto a fast catamaran is a workout. Add the adrenaline rush of speed and competition, and you have good reason for cross training with heavy physical demands, rapid communication demands and brain teasers. Buckley said: “We sail under helmets with noise-canceling headsets. Anything said has to be brief, and you probably won’t make good, rapid-fire decisions if you’re out of breath.”
How to train for that? “Picture working to maximum heart rate and keeping at it while you solve math problems,” Buckley said. “Then try communicating. For real fun, try it while you recite the alphabet backwards.”
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