Life Behind Bar

With Big Support From Land Rover, Ben Ainslie Racing Is Determined to Win the America’s Cup for Great Britain

- Steven Cole Smith

FIVE OF US are in an inflatable boat, engine at idle, maybe 150 feet from the Land Rover BAR America’s Cup catamaran, which is sitting still in the crystal-blue water in Bermuda’s Great Sound. We are waiting for something to happen.

Suddenly, a yell, and the Rover BAR boat takes off. Its hull quickly lifts off the water like a woman raising her skirts before she tiptoes across a puddle. Only the comparatively tiny hydrofoils make contact with the sea, scarcely leaving a wake. How the Land Rover BAR accelerates from a dead stop using nothing but wind power generated by its 78-foot-tall wing sail is simply stunning.

Our inflatable’s powerful outboard engine roars to keep up. Thirty-five knots, or 40 mph, might not sound like much, but on the choppy water we hold on tight to watch the catamaran at speed. The Rover BAR boat goes faster, and we go faster. It’s a manmade force of nature, remarkable to behold from so close.

It’s majestic, like all the America’s Cup boats are. And this one is just that much more interesting because of the automotive connection. Land Rover is the entry’s main sponsor, supplying not only money but also technology, ranging from wind-tunnel time to a multifunction steering wheel to the company’s expertise in computational fluid dynamics.

At the helm is Charles Benedict Ainslie, 40, who helped win the last America’s Cup in 2013 in San Francisco for American billionaire Larry Ellison’s Oracle Team USA as a tactician. Four-time Olympic gold medalist Ainslie is a superstar in this sailing world, especially back home in England, and he is likely the only man who could assemble the financing required to build a new team and a new boat for the 2017 America’s Cup. BAR—not to be confused with Formula 1’s former British American Racing—stands for Ben Ainslie Racing.