Ainslie's Cup Experience

Bob Fisher investigates Ben Ainslie’s inaugural Land Rover BAR America’s Cup campaign

- Bob Fisher

The responsibility of skippering a team with his own name on it, as a first time challenger to the America’s Cup, settled on Ben Ainslie’s shoulders some time ago, when he first established the British challenge, Land Rover BAR.

During the America’s Cup World Series, it was his team on top, yet the America’s Cup proper saw a fall from grace, with the British team bowing out in the semi finals, knocked out by eventual victor, Emirates Team New Zealand, with a 5-2 scoreline.

Asked how, Ainslie admits: “We were not able to catch up with the existing teams in their design and technology game, and we always knew that was going to be a big ask and we had a couple of significant areas where we had problems, and we were not able to bridge that gap with the other teams.

“We made some massive gains in the final couple of months in the areas where we knew we were weak, but ultimately it was not enough.”

STEEP LEARNING CURVE

Ainslie acknowledges these shortcomings came down to their design and foils not being aggressive enough. “That is not to take a dig at the designers,” he insists, “it just came down to a number of issues that we had during the critical testing phase where we were trying to make key decisions on our foil designs. We had a lot of structural issues on our appendages, which meant that we were forced into making decisions with the necessary testing time, and the development time.”