Today in the SF Chronicle Newspaper they had a front page spread on the new tri from BMW/Oracle. Once they finish up all the courtroom battles, maybe we will see some of the most exciting sail races ever! Here is the article.
They call it "Dogzilla" - a towering beast of a high-tech sailing machine whose mast soars into the clouds. It is billionaire Larry Ellison's best shot yet in his quest to capture the America's Cup.
"It's awesome," said Russell Coutts, the Kiwi skipper and chief executive of Ellison's San Francisco-based BMW Oracle Racing. "Something that goes three times wind speed when you're going downwind is incredible. If I was a kid, I'd say, 'How is that possible?' The acceleration is just dramatic."
"It's an incredibly unique boat," said tactician John Kostecki, a world-renowned pro sailor who began racing as a kid on San Francisco Bay. "At times, there's a lump in your throat because of the danger of it all. There are moments when you're on edge."
Dogzilla - the nickname Ellison's sailors have given their monstrous machine - has an archrival, of course. It is the Alinghi 5, a giant catamaran launched Monday in Switzerland on Lake Geneva by Ellison's nemesis, Swiss billionaire Ernesto Bertarelli. Bertarelli's team won the America's Cup in 2003 in Auckland, New Zealand, and defended it successfully in 2007 in Valencia, Spain.
The teams are preparing for a showdown in February - a two-out-of-three America's Cup series on a 40-mile-long racecourse to determine who will win the oldest trophy in professional sport. The venue has not yet been decided. Leading possibilities are Valencia, Abu Dhabi of the United Arab Emirates, and Auckland.
Ellison's team, sponsored by the Golden Gate Yacht Club, is training in the ocean waters off San Diego, conducting speed tests and making design modifications.
"This boat goes so fast that you can actually generate a lot of lift like a hydrofoil," said Ian "Fresh" Burns, the team's head of racing design. "We regularly sail two or three times the wind speed. ... It's a big advantage to have a boat that you can push pretty hard. The guys like to sail it to the limits."
In just a breeze, two of Dogzilla's three hulls are lifted out of the water.
"There's incredible danger from capsizing, but the bigger the boat, the slower the motion happens," Burns said. "It doesn't happen in a fraction of a second."
If the boat doesn't flip over, it might collapse. Because of the tremendous pressure on its carbon-fiber hulls, mast and rigging, there's a threat of sudden breakage. Oceangoing multi-hulls have been known to lose their masts and crack like eggshells.
Ellison's sailors often wear crash helmets.
On Monday, Dogzilla (officially named BOR-90) and several chase boats dodged an outbound Navy warship and an inbound submarine while running tests. An emergency medical technician and a diver stood by. A sailmaker snapped photos to study the effectiveness of the sail shape.
"I think it's actually quite beautiful," said Burns. "It's kind of insectlike. There's a natural form to it. You can't help but be awed by the power and scale of the thing."
Others have compared Ellison's yacht to a spaceship. Its beam, or width, is, like its length, 90 feet - which makes the vessel's footprint the size of a baseball infield.
Its 15 crew members wear electronic earpieces to hear the skipper's orders. It's an international team, with sailors from Italy, France, New Zealand and other nations.
Ellison, the founder and CEO of the Oracle software company, spent about $200 million on his 2007 America's Cup campaign, but failed to reach the challenger finals, and therefore didn't get a chance to race the champion Alinghi team. He had spent $85 million on his 2003 campaign before losing 5-1 to Alinghi in the challenger finals. He has invested untold tens of millions of dollars in his latest campaign.
"It's obviously not cheap. It's a brand-new piece of technology," said Coutts, adding that nearly 60 percent of the campaign's cost is labor. The team has about 75 full-time employees in San Diego, Valencia, and its boat-building facility at Anacortes, Wash.
Dogzilla's black, carbon-composite hull is a 1- to 2-inch-thick honeycomb. Its mast is supported by 1-inch-diameter stays that are made of PBO - an exotic, lightweight material that can handle a pressure load of more than 50 tons. It has a far greater breaking strength than stainless steel.
The boat's machine-laid fiber mainsail is 5,000 square feet, and its gennaker - or largest headsail - is 7,000 square feet.
At times, Dogzilla issues piercing groans as a line wrapped around its huge winches is eased to trim a sail.
From his perch on a sportfishing boat stuffed with gadgetry, Burns eyes the race boat's real-time digital and visual data.
More than 500 sensors have been placed on various parts of the race boat, including its mast, rudder and hull - providing data on about 2,500 variables - to measure the stresses on its components and rigging.
Computer screens at Dogzilla's two steering stations provide digital readouts on everything from boat speed to pressure loads. An alarm sounds if a component is overloaded.
Digital video cameras are mounted on the mast to monitor the sails.
Burns said that Ellison's race boat has reached speeds of "somewhere between 40 and 50 knots." For a sailboat, that's screaming fast - more than twice the speed of traditional, America's Cup yachts with a single hull.
Ellison's design team was assisted by French naval architects who've designed blue water trimarans that have set transoceanic speed records.
"This boat is designed to be pushed flat out pretty much all the time without any slowdowns," said sailing coach Glenn Ashby, an Olympic silver medalist in Tornado catamarans.
Its rotating, aerodynamic mast can be pointed toward the wind, and hydraulic rams - essentially a super-strength water pump - keep the mast vertical even when the boat is leaning over.
"It's a pretty cool machine, that's for sure," said helmsman Jimmy Spithill. "It's probably some of the best, most exciting sailing I've done in my life. There's no way of really relaxing in this boat. You always have to think ahead. If you make a mistake, you'll know all about it."
High-speed catamarans and trimarans are able to sail faster than the wind because these light boats with huge sails create their own wind.
The boats minimize their frictional resistance by using aerodynamically designed foils - wings that are lowered into the water - to help lift one or two of their submerged hulls above the water.
The boat's own velocity creates an "apparent wind" that allows acceleration to speeds that are two or three times the true atmospheric wind speed - or the wind that can be measured when the boat is at rest. The faster the boat speed, the greater the force on its sails - driving the boat forward.
Or, to put it briefly, if unhelpfully: It's physics.
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