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Back To Kindergarten

Alinghi and BMW Oracle Racing helmsmen talk to thedailysail about the transition to multihulls This is something of a rarity at the moment: an article about the America’s Cup which doesn’t once mention the words ‘New York’, ‘court’ or ‘Cahn’.

Both teams have recently decamped temporarily to France’s multihull capital, Lorient. Alinghi were sailing on Gautier’s Foncia until their unfortunate capsize last week. Over the last few days the BMW Oracle sailing team have been on Groupama 2 with Franck Cammas as they have been attempting to match race Pascal Bidegorry and his race team on Banque Populaire (helmsman James Spithill says it has been close with Groupama 2 having the edge upwind, but both boats being pretty even downwind).

At this stage the progress in each team’s training will all come down to how receptive they are to new ideas, for while multihulls are boats that sail on the water this is pretty much where any similarity ends with the world of lead mines they are used to.

Given this, one has to wonder why neither team has filled their sailing squads with French or why Alain Gautier hasn’t been employed to drive the Alinghi multihull while Cammas steers the BMW Oracle boat. Generally it is felt that both teams are looking at the big picture and while the 33rd America’s Cup will be a brief distraction, something they want to get out of the way, neither camp wants to disband their monohull sailing team that they will continue on with towards the 34th Cup, bearing in mind this could be as early as 2011.

Full story on TheDailySail.com (with part two coming today… time to subscribe if you haven’t already…)

www.thedailysail.com

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This entry was posted on Saturday, April 12th, 2008 at 8:39 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.