alinghi_unveiled

© Carlo Borlenghi/Alinghi 2009

Villeneuve, Vaud, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The 90-foot catamaran that Alinghi has spent 100,000 manhours building for the next America’s Cup race was unveiled in Villeneuve 4 July. The boat now goes through a de-bugging process before it will be launched by helicopter into Lake Geneva this week for its first time out on the water. Alinghi, as the winner in July 2007 of the last race, one of the sailing world’s top events,  is the Defender of the America’s Cup. This gives it the right to set the rules, including those for the boat type, for the next race, and the new boat’s design has been a tightly-guarded secret.

The race, says Alinghi, is scheduled for February 2010, but a series of court battles

The boat is a carbon composite construction that needed 30,000m2 of carbon fibers. It was built at Alinghi Villeneuve and Décision Corsier, Switzerland. Rolf Vrolijk, chief designer, says that “people who see the boat for the first time seem surprised at how light and fragile it looks. That is really their first impression.”

Murray Jones is the  strategist and design team responsible for mast and rig programme: Jones points out that the team’s experience of Swiss boats has provided a good base. “This multihull is nothing like you’ve ever seen before in a big boat. It’s like a small boat but scaled up. It’s a highly finely tuned and engineered boat that’s light. It’s a piece of art. Alinghi 5 has evolved from the Swiss sailing boats, like the 41ft ‘Le Black’. The basic engineering concept has come from ‘Le Black’ but everything else has come from the Alinghi design team, starting from a completely blank sheet of paper, with no preconceived multihull ideas. We started designing it and building it and we’ve done a lot of sailing and testing on ‘Le Black’ and the Décision 35s so we’ve incorporated some of the ideas we’ve picked up sailing these boats.”

Vrolijk notes that “For the moment we have pushed the envelope as much as we would like. This boat is really a base for further development and over the coming weeks we will collect as much information as we can and cross-check it with the predictions.  This will help us assess what level we are at and then to optimize from there. We have several opportunities and possibilities to change the concept but first we need a solid base to do our studies from.”

Posted by Ellen Wallace on 6 July 2009 at 12:58 | permalink
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News story, GenevaLunch, 6 July 2009.

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  1. GenevaLunch » Blog Archive » All eyes on Bouveret for Alinghi’s arrival on Lake Geneva Says:
    July 8th, 2009 at 6:33 pm

    [...] “New Alinghi catamaran unveiled”, 6 July 2009, GenevaLunch Posted by :: Ellen Wallace on 8 July [...]

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported
This work by genevalunch.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported.