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March 24, 2010 |
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Paul Cayard, America's Cup sailor and President of the World Sailing Team Association (WSTA), spoke to a standing-room-only crowd Wednesday night at Ullman Sails in Costa Mesa, CA, talking about his sailing career and his recent past at the Louis Vuitton Trophy Auckland. In particular he provided some details under consideration for the path to the next America’s Cup and the new America’s Cup class design. Here's a sample of what Cayard had to say about the possible future of the America's Cup: “Larry Ellison is a founding member of the WSTA and believes in the concept. I’ve had some meetings, and what I can say is [BMWOR] see the Louis Vuitton Trophy and the events being an integral part of the next America’s Cup. What that means exactly is yet to be determined, of course, but it might be something like this.... “We might race the Version Five boats for a couple more years, say, through 2011. Then, in looking at bringing a new class of boat online, what could be clever is to design that rule this year and build four identical boats of the new rule and put them on the circuit, to allow the teams to experience these boats before they actually have to design their own, so that there’s some background and some experience before we have to go out and spend, collectively, 50 or 100 million Euros on a fleet of boats. “The idea would be that all the design information that goes into the research for the rule -- tank-testing, CFD, structural information on the rigs, on the hulls, on everything that goes into those four boats -- would be available to all the teams as sort of a starter kit. And, of course, all the data on those boats. “Then we would race the 2012 season on those boats, shipping them around, then at the end of 2012 we would freeze the actual rule, from which the teams would build one new boat for the Cup. Those boats would be built in 2013 and come online at the end of 2013, probably for one of the Louis Vuitton events. For the first event of 2014, you bring your own boat and those start to really count for something. The Cup’s probably going to be in 2014, that’s my guess, just because, to do this all prudently, not in a rush and do it well, it’s better to do it well than do it in a rush. That’s my personal feeling but Larry and Russell will make the decisions.” --Diane Swintal for CupInfo/©2010
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