AC72 testing

NZH notes that AC teams are only allowed 30 days of testing the new boats between July 1 and January next year. Anyone know why that is? Seems a little odd.

Probably just some obscure rule written in to keep teams on a more even level of experience so it doesn't turn into a total butt kicking like the last AC?

It was intended to keep costs lower so teams with smaller budgets could compete. Testing is expensive and the longer it is permitted the more advantage the high dollar teams might have. One might argue that they already have huge advantages with the design resources they can afford.

The objective seems admirable though I'm surprised that the marginal cost of extra days testing would be so significant. I imagined that most of the costs of putting the boat on the water would be related to people who are on the payroll anyway and that anything else would be relatively small compared with the design and build expenses. I guess there's more involved than I realized.

I don't think it is the cost of the actual testing. I think it is the cost of the refinements that come about from the testing. Next thing you know one of the teams learned of a design advantage and start building a new boat, or cutting and modifying one, then it gets pretty expensive.

Correct, limited testing and IIRC no two boat testing means that teams have to spend their time learning what makes thes boat tick rather than comparing 20 different foil combinations etc. Puts a lot of pressure on the design team to get it right first go.

So they build 75 footers and do two boat testing.

I'm to lazy to look it up but I think that is limited too. Even if its not the testing limit still cuts down on r and d options and without the 30 day limit they still would have built two boats.

Surrogate cats cannot be longer than 10m, thats who the SL33s are exactly 9,999m :-)

But really that's precisely what they're not allowed to do, since once they've had their 30 days in 6 months they're done. That's why the rule seems a little goofy to me. Preventing them from building more than two seems completely reasonable as a way to limit costs and keep a level playing field. How much you achieve beyond that by also limiting testing time is less clear to me. In fact you could argue that it works against the teams who have less money for design development but would benefit more from time on the water 'making the boat tick'.

I think that is a point well worth debate... +1

We're supposed to be watching the best sailors, right? Isn't training a huge component of that?

The AC aren't the only races that limit testing. NASCAR does not allow any testing on tracks where they race and I believe the are very limited in testing on non-NASCAR tracks. Formula 1 only allows testing at their sanctioned tests with all of the teams together. This keeps Hendrick and Ferrari from continuous testing and keeps the computer simulator guys in jobs.