The quest: How the America’s Cup teams are taking their tech cues from Formula One

With the biggest prize in sailing at stake, America’s Cup contenders have come together with Formula One to gain the winning edge for Barcelona 2024, Georgie Ainslie explains.

The America’s Cup has, at its core, always been about design and technology. Since 1851, the only way to win this extraordinary yacht race has been to be faster, braver and more reliable than the opposition. The same can be said of Formula One. The similarities between these two prestigious sports, played out on the water and on the racetrack, are both superficial and substantial.

Common ground can be found in their glamorous appeal; the billionaire backers and luxury brand sponsors, but also in the minutiae that can make the difference between success and second – albeit in the Cup there is no second. With the biggest prize in sailing at stake, it was only a matter of time before the best in both disciplines would join in a quest to win the oldest trophy in sport.

For this, the 37th edition of the Cup, three of the six challengers have some association with a Formula One team: Alinghi (Switzerland) is working with Red Bull Racing; Orient Express Racing (France) is linked to Alpine; and INEOS Britannia and Mercedes share 50/50 partnership, whereby the current campaign’s technical program is spearheaded by the Mercedes F1 team.

So where can the America’s Cup teams gain most from the best brains in the Formula  One paddock?

Understanding fluids

An obvious place to start is in fluids design. Any fan of F1 knows that the single biggest factor affecting the car’s competitiveness is the efficiency of its aerodynamics. The aerodynamics department in a modern F1 team is larger than an entire America’s Cup team, sailors and all.

Ironically, although much smaller, an America’s Cup team is even more dependent on expertise in this field. The yacht is powered by a fluid (the wind) and borne by a fluid (the water), and only those with mastery of these dual fluids will design a boat capable of winning the Cup. All Cup teams are looking to harness as much thrust from the sails for the lowest possible drag. 

And just like an F1 team, which has to maximise the performance of its car in every condition around the lap with a car that is well-balanced, fast and easy to drive, so too, every Cup team is searching for that perfect combination of characteristics that allow the sailors to take off in minimum wind, to tack and gybe with minimal loss of speed and to let rip when the yacht is in a straight line.

Aerodynamics

Although an F1 team is stacked with talented aerodynamicists and has spent decades investing in computational fluid dynamics know-how, this does not mean that they found the challenges of the Cup a breeze. Above the waterline is familiar territory, where the skills honed on race cars translate directly to maximising the aerodynamic efficiency of the rig and hull. Below the waterline, experienced marine hands have helped to shepherd the raw talent of the F1 aerodynamicists, introducing them to the new constraints of cavitation, ventilation and structural dynamics. 

For the INEOS Britannia team, this partnership has been thrilling, as James Allison, the technical director of the Mercedes F1 Team and the Cup campaign, explains: “Compared with the very iterative world of F1, the challenge of America’s Cup has been invigorating for our aerodynamicists. They have found a giant canvas on which to express their pre-existing skills and a stimulating world in which to learn fresh ones. The combined attack of a set of willing F1 aerodynamicists and some experienced marine architects has produced a very effective group.”

Onboard telemetry systems

Another area with overlapping knowledge is systems integration. Beneath the skin of an F1 car, there is a hive of hydraulic, electronic, mechanical and software systems. You cannot make a fast car without knowing how to make all these systems work together. The yacht is just the same – interdependent electronics, mechanical systems, hydraulics and software are the beating heart of the boat, without which a foiling AC75 simply could not sail. 

These mechatronic systems, more extensive on the yacht than in the car in terms of electronic architecture, provide the control systems and actuators the sailors use to sail the boat to its absolute limits. The rules allow for the development of intuitive human machine interfaces (HMI), which, short of allowing an autopilot, give the sailors a huge amount of support in how they control the yacht.

Although there is great expertise in this field that is native to the America’s Cup industry, it is difficult to cover the huge amount of ground necessary with the available resources. The experience of an F1 mechanical, electrical, software or controls engineer is not identical, but it is sufficiently close to allow a partnership that is effective from the outset, and which swells the numbers to make the task feasible.

Andy McLean, INEOS Britannia’s lead systems engineer, comments: “Mercedes F1 use their process and horsepower for [systems] modelling and optimisation, removing weight and increasing reliability. The system is similar, but a lot bigger than a car, so they bring all their years of learning and apply it to the yacht quite easily. It has been impressive to watch.”

Simulation Vs. trial and error

Although the word “simulation” conjures up images of flight simulator-type devices, this so-called Human In the Loop (HIL) simulation is only the tip of the America’s Cup iceberg. The heavy lifting of the simulation is done mathematically, in software. The performance and software engineers in the team work to build every ounce of the team’s understanding of the forces acting on the yacht into elaborate mathematical models. These models are then used to predict the competing performance potential of different designs to allow the promising candidates to be pursued and the failed approaches to be dropped. 

The simulation studies allow trade-offs to be assessed and predictions to be made. The best of these candidate designs are eventually put before sailors, who don virtual reality goggles to feel and assess the behaviour of the virtual yacht as they sail it across a virtual sea. HIL simulation is a vital cog in the machine, but only one part of a vast expenditure of simulation effort to deliver the fastest yacht possible to the race.

Although the timescales and the physics differ – the task of simulation (both virtual and human in the loop) is identical in F1 racing. The human skills are directly transferable, and so, too,  are some of the software machinery. This has been possible because the continuous F1 investment in their simulation architecture has serendipitously created capability generically useful to any high-performance vehicle.

Machine learning

The potential for F1 and Cup engineers to realise benefits from the new machine learning discipline is huge. It is already showing its strength with the AC37 generation of boats, and mastery of this tech is likely to be a big performance differentiator in the next Cup cycle. It’s clear there’s a path here between F1 and America’s Cup teams that’s well worth going down – a voyage of exploration with potential to provide the difference in an increasingly more technical environment. 

As with all partnerships, it’s always a work in progress. F1 generally relies on financial and personnel resources roughly 10 times that of an America’s Cup team. Remember also, F1 competes year in, year out, not once every three to four years as Cup teams do. Working out which processes to incorporate and which just won’t fit into a Cup campaign, for lack of time and/or resource, is where the management teams judgment comes in.

Benefits on both sides 

It’s not one-way traffic in terms of learning. While F1 engineers benefit from working in a large organization that has had many decades to tune its systems and optimize its approach, they have seen how a small, nimble team like INEOS Britannia has advantages, too. F1 teams can create a host of niche engineers, each of them playing their specialized part in a well-oiled machine. America’s Cup teams can afford no such luxury. Each team member must cover much more ground than their F1 equivalent. 

F1, so long able to operate almost without financial constraint, has recently introduced regulations to cap the funds that can be lavished on car engineering, forcing F1 teams to find solutions that are better value for money, and asking employees to widen their scope. For a relationship established purely to build a boat capable of winning the America’s Cup, Allison explains that this is an unexpected and welcome final synergy.

“Early on in this campaign, I was quoted as saying ‘F1 is hard, but America’s Cup is proper hard,’” he says. “Two years on, I stand by this early impression. Time is the enemy of both sports; there is never enough of it. But in America’s Cup, where the ground to cover is so vast and the resources so comparatively small, the sensation of the ever-ticking clock is inescapable.

“I have great admiration for the engineers who have chosen to make these Cup cycles their way of life. Necessity has forced them to find ways of working that make the near-impossible achievable, and to do so to a very tightly constrained budget. For engineers used to the relative luxury of F1, this has been an exciting, eye-opening ride that will serve them very well in the increasingly resource-limited world of modern F1.”

Commercial appeal

Finally, there’s the question of commerciality. What can the Cup world learn from the Formula One world here? Plenty. Since the popular Drive to Survive series came into play, the sport, which was once thought to be inaccessible and at times boring to a wider demographic, is now considered must-watch TV by a growing and younger fan base attracted by the soap opera that is the Netflix Effect. 

Now resonating with a generation that is as interested by the tales off the track as in the results written on them, F1’s popularity has skyrocketed. According to Nielson Sports, the Formula One audience between the ages of 16 to 35 grew to more than one billion by April 2022.

To ensure survival in an ever-congested world of choice, the Cup must pay attention. It should look to Formula One for lessons in how to achieve an audience beyond the purists. It has to understand, as Sir Ben Ainslie, INEOS Britannia CEO and skipper, appreciates, “The potential to grow the sport is huge, but to do that, [it] needs long-term vision and continuity that, due to its quirky governance, the Cup has never had. The opportunity is there for stakeholders and fans alike.”

Access is not something that the Cup has given away lightly over the past 173 years. Successful teams have often been those who have kept their cards closest to their chests and produced an element of genuine surprise when it mattered most. But whoever the victor is in Barcelona this October, they would do well to consider the upsides of what a more modern approach borrowed from another elite speed sport could do for the oldest and perhaps most undervalued sporting trophy.

Georgie Ainslie is a sports broadcaster and host of the Performance People podcast. She is the Founder of ainslie + ainslie, the official supplement supplier to INEOS Britannia and Emirates GBR SailGP teams, and is married to INEOS Britannia CEO and skipper Sir Ben Ainslie. First published in the September 2024 issue of Life Under Sail.