INEOS Britannia & Mercedes F1 Partnership: British Tech Transfer
The INEOS America’s Cup team has built on it’s relationship with Mercedes Formula 1 engineers to develop it’s Britannia AC75. Andre Cotton reports…
The America’s Cup yacht race has long been associated with advanced technology. For the 2021 edition in New Zealand, Britain’s INEOS crew joined forces with the Mercedes Formula 1 team of engineers to help in its quest to win the coveted title.
The relationship was developed late in the competition, when the team was struggling to achieve the desired results. That meant the engineers had only limited time to step in, but the outcome was undeniable. The team recovered form and, although it didn’t win the competition, it certainly felt the benefit of the relationship.
That, then, was the cue to continue into the 2024 edition together. Starting earlier this time, and more carefully allocating resources from the beginning, the development path of the team, the boat and the project was extreme.
The design team of the 2024 boat moved close to the Brackley F1 headquarters, to an airfield with a hanger large enough to house the build of the vessel. That allowed the Britannia yacht designers to integrate fully with the Formula 1 designers and engineers, making full use of the latter’s available facilities.
Test Boat
One of the decisions taken early, and as a result of this move, was to build a test boat, rather than adapt the previous competition boat, or work on an existing AC40 yacht (a smaller version of the AC75 that would be used in competition).
Using the Formula 1 team’s expertise in producing prototypes to a tight schedule, and now to a cost cap, played a key part in making that decision.
‘The famous saying in sport is that you can be over budget, or behind on your timeline; hitting both is pretty hard,’ says Sir Ben Ainslie, the skipper of the crew, team principal and CEO of the INEOS Britannia America’s Cup project. ‘In sport, you have to make the timeline, because they are not going to postpone the start of the race for us.
‘We had a big decision to make early on I the campaign, whether or not to build our own test boat. We could have had the same as the other teams, which is one design [the AC 40] and bolt on your open foils and control systems. That’s a much easier way of doing it.
‘However, we made the decision that we wanted to design and build our own test boat, given the partnership with Mercedes, because a lot of the designers there had never done that. It was well worth the process to go through because it highlighted a number of areas we needed to improve on for the eventual race boat.’
The test boat turned out to be more important than first realised. By the team’s own admission there was a lot of over engineering in it, so the second version, that which competed in the 2024 competition, was revised and much more effective.
‘Last time around [in the 36th edition of the Cup], we were supporting certain specific things, whether it was along the areas of controls, some specific engineering design and testing and some other software-related tools,’ says Geoff Willis, former Chief Technical Officer in Formula 1 who now holds the same position on the America’s Cup team. ‘This time, it’s been very much integrated.’
Skill Alignment
Many of the Formula 1 engineers that helped with the design and build of the INEOS Britannia AC75 have now returned to their regular jobs on the grand prix team. Before they did, though, they worked on all parts of the boat, alongside the experienced yachting design team, assisting in CFD, cell design simulation, software, materials, composite design and powertrain.
‘Clearly, there are experiences and skill sets that are different between the two groups, but I think it’s worth rewinding a little bit and re, emphasising just how impressively overlapped the F1 world and the yacht world is,’ says Willis. ‘Consider that we’ve got carbon fibre composite structures, mechanical systems, transmission systems and hydraulic systems, with electro hydraulic- control pumps. We also have lots of aerodynamics and hydrodynamics; let’s just call it fluid dynamics. It’s pretty much the same.
‘Mathematically, there’s a couple of features that would be new to the F1 world, specifically hydrofoils with cavitation and ventilation. But for all the fluid analysis, all the aerodynamicists in the F1 world would have been well aware of that in their background, training and experience. So, you’ve got all these areas of technical expertise, which are amazingly well aligned.’
Grand Prix / America’s Cup: Cultural Differences
Grand Prix teams generally have a stable core that develop cars together and compete multiple times per year. To do this, they have teams of designers and engineers in the team HQ, but in the America’s Cup there is a small group that generally compete every couple of years, in regattas building up to the main competition, and then the competition itself.
‘A difference in culture is that the Formula One teams, for the main part, have had lots of continuity and stability,’ confirms Willis. ‘Decades of it, and this has allowed the teams to build up an enormous base of team-centered IP capability and technology. People do move between teams, but the team doesn’t lose the stability.
‘With the possible exception of team New Zealand, [the America’s Cup teams] are much more episodic. Come together, work together, work out how to do it. And then a certain amount of that is dissolved at the end of the Cup cycle. Then the next one moves on.’
Using the stable core, the INEOS Britannia team started work early on the 2024 contender. The rules allow for one test boat to be built, and one competition vessel to be built, and that’s the route they chose to take.
‘The protocol allowed us to build three foils with the wings and flaps, with fundamentally the same design,’ says Willis. ‘You can have evolutions of them, but you can’t have completely different concepts of 80 per cent of your foils. The 80 per cent of the foil that goes on the boat must be from common stock, what’s called the immutable part. That put us in the situation of asking what are we going to do with the time we’ve got until we have to commit to design before manufacturer until we go testing on the water?
Maximising Opportunity
‘There’s clearly a lot of opportunity, so we wanted to make sure we best used that. We could either sail the old yacht, or there was the proposal for the AC 40s – this small class of single design foiling yacht, built by Team New Zealand – or build a test yacht ourselves. Given some of the uncertainties at the time about when the AC 40s would become available, and not knowing what sort of opportunity we’d have to experiment with them, we decided the best thing to do was to build a test platform, and use the knowledge we already had about the previous race boat.
‘As it turned out, it also proved to be a very useful tool for testing the whole team as an organisation.
It wasn’t all plain sailing though.
‘We got a number of things wrong with it. We were also late with it, and it was over complex. By the time we got some of the test systems in place on the boat, we pretty much already knew the direction we wanted to go, so it became sort of more confirmatory rather than exploratory.
‘I don’t think any of that made it any less useful though. To be able to say, 14 months out [from the competition], in early April, we were going to put the boat in the water and go sailing in a sensible way. We achieved that, and I don’t think we would have been able to deliver on time, and with the level of reliability, had we not done the test boat in all its detail. We learned a lot as an organisation from a technical point of view, and exercised a lot of the test rigs that we built using the F1 culture.’
Stress Testing the Boat
America’s Cup rules do not allow boats to be tested in a wind tunnel, water tunnel or turning tank, so aerodynamic tests can only be carried out in open spaces. However, for such things as foil arm control, loading rigs, actuators and other mechanical parts, there is no such limitation. This testing was done at the base on the Western airfield, where the boat was put together. It was even stress tested there, turning the hull upside down and applying weight. Failures here are less stressful than on the water for the design engineers.
‘We took the approach where nothing goes on a car unless it’s been tested first,’ says Willis. Having built the two boats, the team developed its crew of data engineers to quickly and accurately analyse the huge amount of data coming from the competition boat. According to Ainslie, much of the development work is done between the start of the America’s Cup – this year in Barcelona in August – and the main competition at the end of October.
With more than 700 sensors on the competition vessel and 30,000 data channels, there’s a huge amount of data coming from the boat that needs to be curated into information that can be analysed and used properly.
Typically a Formula 1 car produces gigabytes of data per run, all of which needs to be downloaded, transmitted back to base and plugged into a simulator, so the testing can continue in a controlled environment. It’s a similar story in America’s Cup competition.
Support Act
‘We have what we call our Sailing Support Room, or SSR, similar to Formula 1,’ says Ainslie. ‘We have an SSR both at the base here in Barcelona and back in Brackley. The data that comes off the boat goes straight to Barcelona and Brackley and the analysis work starts immediately in terms of what are we seeing? If we are not hitting our numbers, why not? Then what can we do? It can be anything from straightline performance to the manoeuvres, so that’s incredibly useful in terms of our rate of learning and development.
‘It’s not totally new. We had something similar in 2017 in Bermuda when we had a data stream back to our base, which was then in Portsmouth, but it was not on the same scale, or at the same level of resource we currently have at Mercedes.’
The Formula 1 cost cap regulation means a number of engineers and team members have to be found other programmes. These could be other racing series, such as the Le Mans Hypercars, or, in this case, working on yachting.
From an F1 engineer’s point of view, there are several attractive traits of America’s Cup competition, including more freedom to design, a different set of parameters that the boat faces, as well as interpreting data. Let’s not forget that, like F1, these are incredibly competitive teams, for whom winning is the only goal.
Mercedes X INEOS: Resource Management
One of the key challenges, then, is effectively managing the engineers in an unfamiliar environment. That’s one of the crossovers from racing to yachting that the Formula 1 team can help with. A Grand Prix team of the 1990s comprised tens of people, but today that number can be north of 1000. Scaling up is one thing, but to do it efficiently is another matter entirely. Although the America’s Cup team is split roughly evenly between the yachting engineers and the grand prix team, integrating the increased manpower into an effective team was one of the hurdles to overcome.
‘We certainly wouldn’t do anything within the Cup programme that was materially beneficial to a Formula One design, but it does two things,’ outlines Willis. ‘It allows you to take your Formula One designers out, give them a new challenge, and it’s quite a mentally refreshing challenge. People have to think through a different set of regulations, and that stimulates the how can I get around these rules? How can I explore these ones? It opens up new engineering problems, allows you to explore ways of dealing with them, maybe ways that you might not have thought of in a different environment, which might lead to a sort of reset on how you tackle problems in general.
‘I think we found all of the people that worked. I wouldn’t say 100% of them, but the vast majority, and probably 90 plus percent have found it very positive. It’s also a way of retaining really good skill when we’re down to this cost cap, sort of micromanagement of the number of people we’ve been able to use, and to get them off the F1 books for a while.
‘We’ve been able to flood the Cup programme with F1 people when we don’t necessarily need them in F1, but desperately need them in the Cup, though not for the whole three years. So there’s been a lot of use there, and that’s clearly beneficial to the cost cap side.’
Platform Stability
One of the big challenges the engineers face is accepting the difference between a grand prix car that operates on a relatively stable platform, and a boat that does not. Sometimes the seas can be choppy due to wind, other times flat and calm, and each condition, each wind or wave profile, requires a different mechanical set up to remain competitive.
‘They’re very difficult to sail,’ says Willis. ‘We’ve got an extremely noisy environment in which we’re doing measurements. So, unlike lap times, where although you see variability due to track conditions, you can pretty much say, if I put this front wing assembly on it’s predictably going to be a second a lap quicker, we just can’t pick up the relative numbers like that at all on the sea. There’s variability in current, waves, wind, which makes those sort of A-B-A back to back tests extremely difficult.
‘The combination of that, and the fact they’re difficult [to sail], you need to build up a lot of statistical basis for your pulling these relatively weak signals of performance improvement. What we’ve seen is an underlying performance improvement, right from day one, when the boat has been on the water. More recently, that curve has taken quite a strong uptick.
‘I think what you do is explore lots of parts, of the sort of operational performance space, and then you begin to learn where the gains are. You go through that routine of understanding, exploring, updating your models, updating the quality of the hardware, because you find where you’ve got problems, and you fix that. There is clearly a positive feedback mechanism, both in absolute objective performance, but also your ability to extract that performance.’
Secret to Success
‘You feel you’re not making huge amount of progress,’ Willis continues, ‘but then it starts gathering pace. I’m imagining everybody will be making huge gains [in the run up to the final competition]. So, the same as in F1, the secret to success here is to ensure your development slope is greater than your competitors, because if it is, you’ll get there.’
This attention to detail is one area Ainslie believes has been a big improvement compared to previous campaigns.
‘It’s a lot harder with an America’s Cup boat [than an F1 car] because it’s much bigger,’ says the four-time Olympic champion. ‘The rules are effectively more open than they are in Formula 1 so you can’t control it in the same way, but we have tried to do that and, in a lot of cases, it’s really paid dividends for us. In other areas, though, there’s a danger that it just complicates the whole thing, and we can’t be doing that.
‘The attention to detail, particularly in areas like fluid dynamics, are something we haven’t been able to match in America’s Cup to date, so that has been hugely instrumental.’
Having spent time in the development phase of the boat this year, the team is already working towards the next competition, possibly in Italy in 2027. The teamWherever it is held, the eam has already learned so much in this project that it is confident it can take even bigger strides in the future. Whether that will be enough to win the next title remains to be seen as others, including Red Bull, are also busy integrating their F1 teams into this extraordinary engineering challenge.
America’s Cup – the challenge
Two preliminary regattas were staged in 2023, using the single make AC40 design. A third regatta was then held in Barcelona, the first time the teams rolled out their AC75 monohull boats, designed specifically for the America’s Cup competition.
Teams compete for the right to take on the defending champion team from New Zealand. There are two round robin competitions, after which the four semi-finalists qualify. The winning boat of the round robin has the opportunity to select its opponent to race, and then at the conclusion of the two semi-finals, the two challengers meet in the final for the Louis Vuitton Cup. The holder of that trophy then earns the right to challenge the champion team.
INEOS Britannia’s AC75
First introduced in 2018, the purpose-built, 75ft, monohull boats are capable of reaching incredible speeds on the water. The hull is constructed of carbon composite material to save weight, while at the same time retaining the strength needed to deal with the impacts experienced with water.
The foils for the 2024 edition were made later to promote quicker lift and faster flight. Weight has been reduced, partly by hardware advances in electronics, hydraulics and software systems, but also by reducing the crew number from 11 to eight.
Some of the boat is spec, including the mast, rigging, foil cant arms and cant hydraulics, but much of the rest of the boat, including the control systems for these cant arms, as well as the design of their trailing edge, is free.
The yacht measures 20.7m in length and weighs 6.5t. Its mast is 26.5m high and top speed is in excess of 50kn.
Toto’s Legs
One of the big changes to the competition this year is that all the boats are using ‘cyclors’ to generate the energy needed to run the hydraulic power for the control systems for the sails. Cyclors are nothing new to the America’s Cup – they replaced the old generators that were powered by arms, before teams realised legs could produce more power.
The target for today’s boats is to generate 500kW of power in 20 minutes via the cyclors.
When the INEOS Britannia team took Toto Wolff and George Russell out on the boat (Lewis Hamilton skipped the water bit of the tour), they found Toto could generate an impressive amount of power on the bike. Not enough that they would consider him in competition but still notable!
More on the America’s Cup
- Puig Women’s America’s Cup: All-Female Crews Take Centre Stage
- 37th America’s Cup: Key Info, Dates & How to Watch
- America’s Cup Boats: What it’s like helming an AC75
- INEOS Britannia Team Profile: Royal Yacht Squadron
- INEOS Britannia Win: Ben Ainslie’s Team in Louis Vuitton Cup Final
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