The PR nightmare for cats with the AC is this: To the general public, and typical AC fans, cats only come into play when the whole event is in trouble (DoG matches). Cats then get a guilty-by-association view and whenever the general sailing media refers to the ACs with cats, they are always seen as inferior events and a black eye on the history of the AC. I've already seen a bunch of articles in which the author and/or quoted "experts" are saying that they just want to get past this chapter and get the AC back to the event it should be (monohulls)...
Mike
Agreed. To the general sailing public, this is a "freak show" and these are not "real" sailboats.
Oh, I don't know if I agree with that. It's hard to look at these two boats and deny them as incredibly refined sailing machines. All the precise engineering and relentless chase for all the speed imaginable and, if nothing else, the incredible scale of these boats is hard to not appreciate...I don't care who you are.
