Gino Morrelli and business partner Pete Melvin have
been successfully designing state-of-the-art multihulls for a very long time, but
other than their involvement in the 27th edition of the America’s Cup, which
saw the Stars and Stripes catamaran win its defense against the Kiwis, they’ve
been absent until recently from the AC scene for obvious reasons. They were
seconded by Oracle for their (successful) 2010 challenge against Alinghi, and
this go around, the M&M team participated in writing the new AC72 Class
Rule before being hired away by ETNZ to design its AC72. Pete joined the team
in New Zealand, while Gino has been holding the fort in their Newport Beach,
Calif., office and been peripherally involved with design team meetings.
Morrelli’s hot on foiling as the way to go forward
in all things AC. “Most people don’t realize we’ve been dealing with foiling
for almost four years, before the 2010 Cup," he says. "We designed
the Nacra 20 that’s been in production for five years now, that had curved
foils; prior to that we built an A-Cat with curved foils. We’ve been building
power cats for 15 years with foils. People playing with catamarans have been
playing with foiling for a long time.” We caught up with Morrelli for his
insight on the big picture of the AC72 design:
The 72 seems to be a designer’s dream and
a sailor’s nightmare. How did you get to the boat we have today?
GM: Most of the 72 was dictated by
Russell [Coutts] and the Oracle guys. After the 2010 Oracle campaign, they
retained us [morrelli & Melvin] to do some performance analysis on
different sized trimarans— a trimaran being the original contender with a soft
rig. We did all kinds of analysis on things from 60 to 90 feet—cost estimates,
performance estimates, and providing them with a matrix of options there.
The cat was part of an early allegiance to move
boats from one country to another—de-mounting boats and shipping boats on
planes around the world—cats would simplify this craziness, [with] less parts.
The transition to the wing on top of it—there was no real research done on our
part—was just like a declaration by Oracle, “We want a wing. Tell us how big a
wing we can put on.”
Then, they constrained us with needing to fly a
hull in 6 knots of wind. Once the boat size was determined, it determined the
wing size by the requirement that it had to fly a hull in 6 knots of wind—that
opened up the whole Pandora’s box of the rig being really big for San
Francisco. That’s where the idea of two rigs came about—big and little—with the
rig committee determining the night before the race which rig people would have
to use. That got dismissed because of cost and management problems. The next
idea was to put a removable top on the rig—15 feet off the rig—but the harsh
reality of taking tops of rigs with control systems, etc.? Not really. So we
ended up with the big rig for all purposes all the time. Due to cost and
complexity, the idea of an alternate smaller rig also went by the wayside. I
think it was one of those situations where Oracle ran out of time, and it was
either do nothing or mandate a whole lot of expense. Everybody knew you’d end
up with a boatbuilding team and a wing-building team. The two never really
cross over very much—you end up having to babysit the platform with a set of
guys and same thing with a wing—it now takes 35 guys to launch a wing.
Let’s assume multihulls carry on into
AC35. What will follow the AC72?
GM: I think the excitement that has
been generated in this Cup has way more to do with foiling and flying than the
wing. If we used the same platform with soft rigs and rotating masts with fully
battened sails, then first you can reef them, second you can launch them at
your leisure like a normal boat, and third you eliminate the wing-building team
and the problem with the handling of the wing, the hydraulics, and control
systems. In reality the difference between the performance of the boats with a
wing on foils and without the wing on foils, won't be much. They’ll still sail
at 40-plus knots. Maybe they don’t sail at 165 degrees downwind, but at 163 to
160, and they’ll probably still fly in as little wind.
When we did the ’88 campaign with the soft rig and
the hard rig, the delta between the two boats in the end was only about 1 or 2
percent, which is huge if you’re racing those boats against each other. There
is a lot of economic push to go back to monohulls because there are guys
sitting on the sideline that got pushed out in 2010. In fact, when we were
developing the Rule for AC34, we’d get calls like, “Well, how many guys are
going to be on board?” or, “You’re not going to put that engine on board are
you, because that’ll displace about eight guys.” Some of these guys had made
their livelihood off the Cup for 30 years.
Should the boats continue to foil if multihulls
remain?
GM: I think it’d be a travesty if
they didn’t foil. All they have to let us do is articulate the rudders, put
flaps on, or articulate the rudders and angle the tack, and these boats will
get way faster overnight. The benefit that we’re tapping into right now is just
beginning. Back in ’88 I was involved in researching the defense of the use of
catamarans in one of the court battles. One of the things we learned was that
George Schulyer who wrote the Deed of Gift, sailed a catamaran. The naissance
of the America’s Cup has much more to do with the American defense program. The
Cup was taken from England when we were just a baby of a country compared to
England. The reason that the AC victory was so fundamental at the time was that
it was a breaking out of American ingenuity and technology, challenging the
English. The DofG was an attempt to create an event that promoted naval
architecture for American defense as it was for a yachting competition, at a
time when domination of the sea controlled your security for trade and
prosperity—all those guys were nation-builders back then. It was the space race
of the time. That’s what the Cup is.
What’s your opinion on the subtleties of
the hull shapes?
GM: They almost don’t matter
anymore. Even upwind, unless you’re sailing in 2 knots of wind, you’re always
trying to generate a bigger fraction of lift off the daggerboards. When we
first started with ETNZ, the only tools we really had that were highly
developed were all based on monohulls. It took about 3 or 4 months before the
CFD tools got sophisticated enough to start accounting for daggerboard lift
because it’s a very interesting mathematical problem to analyze a hull that
goes from fully immersed in displacement mode to flying in the air. The whole
drag curve tradeoff with the size of the foils, the position of the foils,
angle of the cant—all that had to be developed. A big matrix of hull shapes was
generated, and we looked at every boat that was relevant in the last 3 or 4
years, whether it was an A Cat, a F18 or F20, anything in that genre, and ran
it through the CFD. In the end, from the best to the worst it was like .5
percent. There wasn’t any giant delta to be won or lost. After going through 50
to 60 boats, the fastest hull shape was basically an existing boat. The joke
was, “Don’t let Grant know because he’ll fire us as we’ve just spent four
months trying to find a better hull shape and we couldn’t.” The whole idea of
hull shapes being important has been superceded by how important daggerboards
are and foils are. We joked that the hulls had become “board delivery
devices."
It was suggested that ETNZ’s hull shape
probably saved them from a worse fate in their recent nosedive?
GM: With ETNZ’s recent crash, the
hull shape did come into play, but it was the volume that was important, not
the shape. The only important decision with the hull shape design was
how much bow you stuck in front of that daggerboard to accommodate for any
crash, and that’s where you see a delta between the shapes, between Oracle,
Artemis, and ETNZ—how big a bow to stick on it to survive the inevitable which
is what happened to Oracle when they capsized. Both teams did a weather hull
pitchpole. We’re not capsizing over the leeward hull, we’re starting to capsize
over the weather hull, which is a completely new way to capsize a catamaran.
The hull shapes are not going to determine who won or lost the America’s Cup by
a long way except for the lack of survivability—the nose—Oracle’s a lot finer,
a lot narrower in the front, and we’re a little fuller and taller. We carry
around the extra windage and a little more weight.
You and Pete were part of the team who
wrote the Class Rule then went on to design ETNZ’s boat. What was the benefit
to ETNZ?
GM: Obviously we had an insight as to
why it was written the way it was. We were directed by Oracle and Mascalzone
Latino to address any particular fundamental issues, like hull point speeds,
weight, crew limits, that sort of thing. It was very much a big group working
together for months. Like any group decision it’s never perfect. It’s a bunch
of visions pushed together with certain compromises. We [Melvin & Morrelli]
took a bit of a different path—we had about six of us in our office who were
involved in the Rule writing, so we divided the office in half, with half the
team writing the Rule and the other half troubleshooting the Rule. For example,
Pete was writing the Rule, and I was on the other side challenging the Rule.
One of the jokes in-house was that we were very wary that we could write
a rule and have a loophole in it that we would not be aware of, and once it got
published we were particularly concerned that someone like Juan K. would read
the Rule and interpret it to the point where he’d find a loophole and someone
would somehow magically come out with a Rule-beating boat that somehow we had
never envisioned. So we were always saying to ourselves, “How would Juan K.
read this?” In the office we would force internal argument about the definition
of every single line because we were trying to define something that didn’t
exist, that was new.
Wasn’t the Rule designed to discourage foiling?
GM: No, that’s a bunch of crap. When
we were writing the Rule we were really pushing Oracle and Mascalzone Latino to
take all the constraints off the daggerboards and rudders and let it be the
Pandora’s Box: Let’s have active control systems and wands, let’s see what people
can come up with. Oracle was quite supportive of that, and we wrote a Rule. One
edit that survived 2 or 3 weeks stated that there were really no constraints on
daggerboards and rudders—you could have articulation, flaps, moveable systems,
you could have moveable extensions like a Moth or a tri-foiler.
The ML guys weighed in and put the veto on it—they
didn’t want to let these boats out loose with no Rule. I think the rationale at
the time for them was that they knew Oracle was already going to have a headstart
on the wing, and they knew that we already had curved foils on the trimaran.
They knew that the big boats were already progressing toward higher lift
fraction (the amount of lift that the boards produce as opposed to the amount
of lift the hulls produce, like a fully-flying boat is a 100-percent lift
fraction—all the higher boat weight is on the foils whereas you could have
90-percent lift fraction, where 90 percent is on the foils and 10 percent on
the hulls). At the time Oracle was fully supportive of a full flying boat, all
bells and whistles. But we were asked to back it down so we reluctantly started
trying to carve out a Rule that didn’t preclude flying but made it a little bit
more challenging without all the bells and whistles.
What were the compromises which have
resulted in somewhat “awkward” daggerboards?
GM: The compromise was to allow the
daggerboards a fair amount of freedom—you could cant them, change the rake,
twist them, rake them up and down, but you couldn’t translate them, which means
move them fore and aft of the boat which is important for certain windspeed
conditions where you may have a big gennaker up front and may want to move a
board forward, for example, but that would have been a big structural
challenge. It was agreed that we could put elevators on the rudders—we still
wanted to have articulating elevators so that the elevators could move like an
airplane with flaps that the crews could actively adjust like a Moth. So, the
outcome was we got elevators but no controls.
The joke was it was like giving us an airplane that
could fly but with a dead stick. You don’t get to change its angle of tack or
control with the rudder. It put all the emphasis on changing the flying on the
daggerboards. At the time I think they felt that was going to be a big enough
constraint to keep the boat costs down by not having all these crazy
systems—wands, sensors, crazy hydraulic pressures—and that would make it hard
to fly. Oracle and Artemis made early assumptions that you may not get there
from here, but we knew we could fly—we’d had experience with three or four
other cats.
Where do you think your experience really
kicked in for ETNZ?
GM: The 72 was designed from the
start as a foiling boat. We’d already designed the SL33 with curved foils. ETNZ
immediately bought two of them, and we tried dozens and dozens of foil
combinations on the SL33 before we built the first 72. By allowing us to have
elevators, everyone knew that we were going to fly. It was just a matter of how
we would control it, and that’s where every team has fought for a various
technique to control flying in a response to the rule restriction. If we could
control the rudders we would have a different daggerboard. We knew we would fly
but not whether we’d fly under control. We were afraid that Juan K. or Dirk Kramers
or one of the other smart guys around the table would figure it out before we
did. As it turns out, we have a solution that gets us around the racecourse.
Pete [Melvin] has said previously that multihulls
can be match-raced, a sentiment not shared by many. Do you concur?
GM: I don’t care. The America’s Cup
is not about match racing. The America’s Cup is about building the fastest boat
possible to get around the course. Match racing was really only an evolution of
the 12-Metre and boats that go slow. You have to read the Deed of Gift to
understand the intention of the America’s Cup.
Can you point out the design differences with Luna
Rossa’s first generation 72 versus ETNZ’s Aotearoa?
GM: Yeah, they had a generation 1
boat, and we had a generation 2.5 boat. There was a lot of refinement in the
systems that control the boatspeed and maneuverability. You have to have
fully-orchestrated maneuvers now to keep the thing on foils and coming out of
the jibes with the minimum loss of VMG. The difference between a good foiling
jibe and someone basically dropping a hull in the water is around 400 meters.
Now the difference between a good foiling jibe and a bad foiling jibe is still
100 meters. A lot of it is maneuverability, the articulation system of the
wing, the self-jibing of the jib, the crew-weight transfer, daggerboard timing
going up and down—all at 45 knots in racing pressure, or what we call, “racing
in anger." It’s where the big deltas are going to occur.
Likewise, what’s with the Oracle boat that stands
out versus ETNZ’s boat?
GM: Oracle have a narrower boat so if
we get into displacement sailing, like in 8 knots of wind, they may have a
“slippier” hull which may be an advantage if it’s super light. Just watching
them sail over the past six to seven weeks you can see that they’re climbing up
the learning curve fast. Their daggerboards and control systems have evolved
towards ETNZ’s. They have a theoretically better system, but I think they’ve
basically thrown in the towel and said, "We can’t seem to make this work,
we’re going to have to go to a self-adjusting system, a self-leveling
system." So they gave away, I think, one of their potential advantages in
a breeze.
Oracle’s biggest advantage is more time in San
Francisco, more money and resources. They probably have the ability to sail the
boat “in anger” than ETNZ may choose to at certain points. Kostecki has
probably got 10,000 more hours on the Bay than Ray Davies or Dean Barker, like
one event last summer in the ACWS where Spithill went from dead last to first
in one blast, literally sailing through the fleet. That’s a clear advantage. I
think Jimmy is aggressive enough that he could drive the boat toward major
league danger and force Dean and ETNZ to flinch. They have the resources to be
able to risk it all unlike ETNZ. Oracle may be willing to risk and pull the
trigger to kill the program in a jibe.
How do you control costs in this game?
GM: If you mandated all the boats to
go back to soft rigs and change the box so that wings were eliminated, you’d
kick out a bunch of costs. I think the whole argument about money is a
fallacy—every team will spend what they raise. We could make the boat half as
big and Larry Ellison would spend just as much money. The team doesn’t get any
smaller! We’re not controlling costs by controlling boats or people. Even Dean
and Grant [ETNZ] would spend every dime that they raise if they could.
Is there already some back-room designing
going on somewhere?
GM: Absolutely.
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