Data collection is key and the stable conditions in Palma has maximised our time on the water and enabled T6 to deliver the numbers!
Ineos Britannia set up sailing operations in Palma in October 2022, and now, nine months later, the team is packing back up and moving on. “We've had a really good block of testing,” commented Sailing Team Manager, Giles Scott. “We're at the end of that now and looking forward to the move to the venue in Barcelona.”
The team arrived in Palma with a clear set of goals for the brand new test boat T6, and despite some challenges, leaves with them completed. “T6 is ultimately a bit of a science experiment,” explained Scott. “It's a test platform. It's a data collection tool. Its sole purpose is to enable us to build a fast race yacht for Barcelona in 2024. It's full of instrumentation, with lots of sensors.
“Our primary purpose sailing it here was to produce clean data that feeds back into the design engine back in Brackley. There was a lot of discussion almost a year ago now, as to where we should base the sailing operations. And it was a pretty big call to move away from UK waters, as we've sailed out of Portsmouth in previous campaigns.
“Setting up a remote base down here in Palma comes with its challenges. The team gets split, with the core of the design team still up in Brackley. But I think, looking back over the past six months or so it was a really, really good call. Sailing through the winter in the UK comes with its own challenges. It's cold. A lot of weather systems roll through, and while you can muscle up and grunt through that, the reality is that your productivity gets hit. And the great thing about being down here in Palma is that it has a range of conditions. The climate has been generally pretty kind to us, and it has enabled us to get more hours on the water.”
One of the biggest challenges for the team came when T6 capsized. “The capsize might very well have been the world's most expensive team builder,” said Scott. “We never want to have any issues like that. We don't want to capsize this boat, it’s expensive and it is our primary asset for the whole organisation at the moment. So when we came close to writing it off… that's really no good. However, it did give us an opportunity to flex our muscles and our operational know-how and capabilities – and the reality is that the team has to be able to respond to situations like that.
It was just three weeks later when T6 was back on the water, and the team has now completed 54 sailing days in Palma. “A lot of good came out of the whole thing,” added Scott. “There was a lot of mistakes and there was also an awful lot of good. And I think the great thing about it was that it pulled everyone together. It also allowed us to refine the processes and the team's capability to deal with extreme situations like that.”
Once T6 was back in the water, the programme stepped up a gear. “What's been great is the level of involvement for the wider team in really driving the Sailing Team, and the Test and Validation group, as to what the key questions are that they wanted answered. And then our role has been to execute those testing requirements and send that information back. The hope and the goal is that all these sailing days, and all that data sent back, will result in a boat that doesn't just look the part, but goes the part too.
“Completing testing is a milestone. Getting to the venue is a massive milestone. And then the next one after that will be launching the race boat. And we're slowly edging our way to the sharp end of this campaign. It's exciting. And I think the whole group is desperate to get to the race course – and a real key part of our time down here has been the merging of two organisations. We've got the group formed from America's Cup people, and then the Mercedes F1 design team -- and it's not an easy process to merge those two organisations together, let alone at the scale of what we've been trying to do, and over a very short period of time.
The Palma testing period was also significant for the first two-boat operations completed by the team since the end of the 2017 campaign. “We've been able to get into some two-boating out here in Palma, which was a goal that we had from the outset, and it was a big success. T6 was not designed to race and we really didn't know what the performance of the AC40 would be like. We’ve been quite fortunate that T6 and the AC40 appear capable of racing and testing against one another going forward, which again is exciting for us as a sailing team rolling into Barcelona. It offers another opportunity; for comparison testing and more help to making those key decisions going forward.”
Image: © CGREGORY/INEOS BRITANNIA