Sailing wisdom holds that if a weakness exists, the sea will find it.
Australia SailGP team members experienced this firsthand just before the start of Race 7 of the Oracle San Francisco Sail Grand Prix in March, when the wing sail of their F50 collapsed. No one was hurt, but an investigation revealed a construction problem affecting multiple boats.
SailGP, which owns and maintains the league’s 12 identical foiling catamarans, began to fix the problem. This included investigating the cause of the failure, canceling the next event and upgrading all of the fleet’s wing sails.
While the incident was striking, it illustrated a larger challenge for the league, which will hold its next event — the Emirates Great Britain Sail Grand Prix — in Portsmouth, England, on Saturday and Sunday.
F50s may look like they fly effortlessly across the water on hydrofoils, but back ashore it takes a small army to ensure that the boats are constantly ready and evenly matched.
“Every F50 has daily pre- and post-sailing checks that take place from all departments: electronics, hydraulics rigging, boatbuilding,” said Joel Marginson, director of SailGP Technologies, the league’s design, engineering and manufacturing operation. “At the end of the event, all the boats and wings are completely disassembled and fully serviced.”
Marginson said this includes nondestructive testing — for example, ultrasonic testing, thermography and radiography — to identify any issues.
“We’re scanning everything, but primarily we’re looking at the highest-loaded areas,” he said. Areas of concern are mapped, he said, which allows SailGP’s Tech Team — the arm of SailGP Technologies that maintains and repairs the F50s at each event — to compare scans with historical tests.
Additionally, each F50 has 125 sensors that capture about 4.4 billion data points during each race day. The data is sent to an Oracle-run cloud. While the sailors parse the data to optimize their performance, Marginson said the Tech Team combs through the data using artificial intelligence to find anomalies, which are investigated.
“We also have a calibration process that, before every event, every F50 is calibrated and equalized,” Marginson said. “So we’ll be able to pick up anything that’s out of the usual.”
That’s a benefit of the league’s structure.
“That’s one of the advantages with a centrally controlled organization that can monitor everything,” said Russell Coutts, SailGP’s CEO and a five-time America’s Cup winner. “If something isn’t performing as it should and needs to be replaced, you can pretty much identify it straight away.”
There’s also the analog approach.
“One hundred percent, the sailors have feedback,” Marginson said. “We take that feedback extremely seriously to try [to] diagnose an issue.”
Tom Slingsby, the Australian team’s driver and CEO and an Olympic gold medalist, said he felt encouraged to share feedback. “We’re in constant dialogue with the design team about ‘Are there dangers? What could be done better? Are we getting close to structural limits?’”
The Australia SailGP team — which rebranded as Bonds Flying Roos in June and which is owned by Slingsby, Hugh Jackman and Ryan Reynolds — clearly found a structural limitation at the San Francisco event. Slingsby, who helmed the Australian team to win the league’s first three championship titles, said that on that March day, the 15- to 16-knot winds were “perfect” and the team was executing normal starting-line maneuvers.
“We were sort of coming in with speed and looking for a gap,” Slingsby said, noting that the team had used the same tactic during the two previous races.
But then the team’s wing sail collapsed, and SailGP Technologies was called to help.
“First we needed to be confident that we had gotten to the root of the problem,” Marginson said, describing an approach involving core samples and other tests. “Then we got structural engineers and designers involved.”
The analysis revealed a problem with the way that the cores of the wing sail’s shear webs — internal components of the wing sails that help provide structural integrity — were bonded.
Marginson said that fixing the issue on all of the fleet’s wing sails was a huge operation.
“You’re looking at probably 12- to 15,000 man hours,” he said, explaining that the work was conducted by SailGP Technologies staff members and contractors on two continents over six to eight weeks.
This time frame meant that the Enel Rio Sail Grand Prix, which had been scheduled for May 3-4 in southeastern Brazil, had to be canceled. “It was an obvious decision,” Coutts said. “We’re not going to send boats on the water knowing we have an issue with the wing sails. That would be reckless.”
The repairs were successful, and last month’s Mubadala New York Sail Grand Prix, off Manhattan, was held without incident. “I didn’t sleep until the New York event was over,” Marginson said.
Still, the accident raises the question of an F50’s working life.
“That’s something you’re trying to understand as you go,” said Paul Bieker, a two-time America’s Cup-winning naval architect, who works as a contracted designer for SailGP. “Indications are so far that they’re holding up really well,” he said of the carbon-fiber boats.
While Bieker said that part of this came down to the F50’s careful engineering, as well as carbon fiber’s fatigue-resistant nature, the boats still require maintenance to be raced to their full potential.
“We have the ability to do most of the maintenance and structural repairs on tour,” Marginson said, referring to SailGP’s events. “There’s a big push for more spare parts.” The league, he said, now travels with 40-foot containers for spares.
While this allows teams to keep racing following noncatastrophic breakages, Coutts said that the F50’s modular nature also helps with upgrades.
“We don’t need to build a whole new boat to revolutionize the performance,” he said, referring to improved technology that the league has developed.
New components, Marginson said, are produced at a SailGP Technologies facility in England and are added to the fleet.
“We don’t wait until a new season to implement a new product or an upgrade,” he said. “These projects can take years to go through the design conceptual phase and manufacturing phase so that when they’re ready, we’ll implement them.”
These evolutions add up. Bieker estimated that the boats are 10% to 15% more refined this season than their Season 1 configurations. Examples include the wing sails, which are now adjusted by the wing trimmers using a computerized — or fly-by-wire — control system, whereas the wing sails in Season 1 were mechanical, as well as the new T-shaped hydrofoils.
“Over time, the boat will evolve,” Coutts said. “Take a still picture of an F50 today, and you look at it in 10 years’ time,” he said. “There might still well be components on that boat in 10 years’ time that are there today.”
Take the league’s T-shaped hydrofoils, which were introduced in January. They are used in winds above 10 knots, while the older L-shaped foils are used in softer winds.
Slingsby described the new T-shaped foils, which the team was using in San Francisco when the wing sail failed, as being like new tires for a racecar.
“The old tires go quite fast, but the new tires are just a bit more responsive,” he said, adding that the boats have more sideways slip during hard turns on the L-shaped foils. The T-shaped foils, Slingsby said, behave differently than the L-shaped foils. “You don’t have as much slipping, and you have more grip.”
These equipment changes, coupled with wear and tear and the aggressive way the boats are raced, mean SailGP Technologies has a crucial job of keeping the boats flying and the sailors safe.
This latter responsibility is not lost on the athletes themselves.
While Slingsby described the wing-sail collapse in San Francisco as scary, he said he was satisfied with SailGP’s investigation and remedy. “I jumped on the boat at the next event in New York,” he said. “It didn’t even cross my mind that the boats might not be safe.”
Although the New York event was contested using the older L-shaped foils, Slingsby said that was a weather-driven decision.
“If the wind is above 10 knots in Portsmouth, we’ll be on the T-foils,” he said.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times. Written by David Schmidt. Photo courtesy of SailGP.
