Personally I would like to see a AC45-like boat, one design hull shape, open soft-sail rig and open foils, essentially what Morrelli suggested. Notably cheaper, speed the same, more teams etc. Probably not in the best interest of the defender so unlikely, but one can dream.
What your suggesting is not the format for the AC. The AC is a design competion as Morrelli said. Forget about the one design any thing concept.
Yes, that is not true to the DoG, so it'll be open development. As a spectator, I want to see more boats line up as challengers, so lowering the costs is key, but billionaire's think differently.
Biggest surprise to me is ETNZ has Grant Dalton on board as a grinder for at least one race a day, at his less than youthful age. Really that is great news for everyone, if you stay in shape you can still get the job done even at 40+ kts. That suggests the current team might be sticking around for the next cycle.
I'm impressed at ETNZ's speed honestly. I thought they would have an edge, but was 50/50 before this weekend, thinking Oracle would come out of the gate much stronger. Well in Race #4 they did but the delta was 8 freaking seconds!! Why Oracle didn't hire M&M from day 1 was always dumbfounding...
The class of boats doesn't have much of anything to do with the Deed of Gift. They can run it however they wish as long as the defender and challenger agree. The challenger series is a relatively new development in the history of the cup and certainly wasn't any part of it's history prior to that. It was the Defender racing the sole Challenger for most of the Cup's history. It could technically be a strict one design but given the bank accounts, typical personalities coupled with the lack of ability to leverage expensive technical advantages in a one design setup, we'll probably never see it.
