TECH STORY: the NEW AC50 00:04 Tom Slingsby
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TECH STORY: THE NEW AC50 00:04 Tom Slingsby, Tactician and Helmsman, ORACLE TEAM USA, English “The AC50 is a 15 metres catamaran, capable of achieving speeds of a 100km/h. 00:12 15 designers and 50 boat builders have contributed to the design and built of the AC50. >> 00:19 Our testing boats were designed to be as close to our racing boat as possible, but now that we’ve improved over the last couple of years, improved the systems of our testing boats, we’ve put all of this in our new racing yacht.” >>00:31 00:36 Jimmy Spithill, Skipper ORACLE TEAM USA, English “The boat is, you know, literally more powerful, it's longer and much more efficient and we see that every time we go out in the water now on the AC Class boat, the boat is already faster, it’s already exceeding a lot of the predictions that we had from our design tools.” >>00:45 00:47 Ian Burns, ORACLE TEAM USA, English “One of the challenges is the boats are very, very undermanned. There are not a lot of people on the boat who are grinding on a winch handle so the skipper for example has to do a number of tasks at the same time.” >>00:58 01:00 Tom Slingsby, Tactician and Helmsman ORACLE TEAM USA, English “Steering an AC50 is very tough. You’ve got to be looking at the wind, you’ve got to be listening to the crew, you’ve got to be thinking about the tactics on the race course, there’s so many different things going on, so the helmsman’s job is probably the hardest job on the boat but we’re lucky we have a pretty good one!” >>01:14 01:16 Jimmy Spithill, Skipper ORACLE TEAM USA, English “We’re looking at multiple changes per second everything obviously has to be done by the athletes on board the boat it’s all human powered and it's really, you know, this wheel is what helped to start it all. 01:29 So what happens now is: all of the challengers will come together and then will go through essentially an elimination series. Double round robins, they then get the semifinals, then, go to a final and the winner of that final will come to race us in the America's Cup. Keep your finger crossed for Oracle Team USA, the America’s Cup here in Bermuda.”>>01:48 Ends: 01:57 min .