Chief Operating Officer Dave Endean reflects on the first few weeks in Barcelona, the 37th America’s Cup Venue for 2024, as the Team begin a fresh testing period with their T6 Test Boat and AC40 Athena (One-design Race Boat).
“Our first impressions of Barcelona are that it's a great place. Good weather with lots of tourism, it's a very busy place but for us that really adds to the excitement of getting here. There are glimpses of five other teams here at the moment and that heightens the competition for the team, so things are starting to really drop into place and you realise what we're doing here and what it's all about.
“The sailing has been great so far, we're in the middle of summer so we're getting quite a lot of sea breeze action. The first thing that everyone's identifying, like the other teams have, is the sea state. We were very aware of the sea state and what the predictions were going to be, but until you're in there in these little 40 footers and dealing with it yourself, it always catches you a little bit by surprise, but it has been a great couple of weeks.
“Our sailing operations have only moved from Palma, so it's not like we've moved a great distance, but that has not changed the workload on the team. We were efficient with our sailing program in Palma right up until the last day and we've had five weeks of relocation time while we moved operations from Palma to Barcelona.
“It's been a big test for the whole team to get here and be fully operation in such a short timeframe. Full credit to everyone for digging in over the last five weeks and getting us sailing and in a good place.
“The AC40 is typically a little bit easier for us to get sailing. With T6 ,we've got a lot more equipment on board that boat, it's directly linked to a lot of our design requirements and processes for our AC75 race boat design.
“It was important for us to spend more time taking T6 apart, servicing all the kit and then putting her back together again. The 40 is more plug and play and it's a good milestone for us to kick off our Barcelona sailing program.
“It was a bigger stepping stone for us to have T6 back on the water, there's still a lot more that we can learn from having our own design on the water. We've got some key design dates coming up in the next two to three months and T6 is a massive part of making sure we answer those questions with as much information as we can. We'll have a bit of a balance in the next couple of months between preparing for the AC40 events, but also meeting the technical team requirements of getting information out of T6.
“It's important for the whole team, from the sailing team all the way through to the operations and technical team, to get information out of the venue and also look at how we're going to operate here in a year's time as an efficient team. We're in similar conditions to what we'll see leading into the Challenger Series next year, and it's not just the sea state on the water that everyone's curious about or the effect of the sea breeze, but equally being here in this environment, getting the families, crew and whole team settled down. Plus, we’re also getting used to this heat and how we're going to operate on the water and keeping the sailors in the best shape prior to racing.
"The next couple of months are going to be interesting. We have the preliminary events coming up, which is a good milestone marker for the sailing team to sort of check in, see how they're going internally and see how they're going against other teams.
“It's getting pretty exciting. You're in this environment here now where you see all the other teams over the fence and you see them out in the water regularly, that's very motivating.”
Image: © CAMERON GREGORY