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Great Britain will compete in the America’s Cup for the first time in 60 years when they face New Zealand in Barcelona, with the best-of-13 series starting on Saturday.
Four-time Olympic champion Sir Ben Ainslie skippered Ineos Britannia to victory over Italy in the Louis Vuitton Cup to secure the Royal Yacht Squadron’s place as official challenger.
Here, the PA news agency takes a look back at how the team was founded and its journey towards earning a coveted place in the 37th America’s Cup.
So, where did it all start?
Ahead of the London 2012 Olympics, Ainslie announced the formation of his own team – Ben Ainslie Racing (BAR) – which was set to compete in the 2012/13 America’s Cup World Series qualifying events.BAR was at the time underwritten by United States’ team Oracle Racing, with Ainslie going on to join them as a tactician for their ultimately-successful defence of the 34th America’s Cup in 2013.Having been part of the winning crew which defeated New Zealand after a remarkable fightback from being 8-1 down in San Francisco, Ainslie set about raising a funding target of around £80million for a home-grown British team aiming to build towards qualification for the 2017 running of the oldest international sporting competition.
The high-profile launch in June 2014 at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich was attended by the then Duchess of Cambridge, who is a keen sailor.BAR was now backed by the likes of co-founder of Carphone Warehouse Sir Charles Dunstone and with experienced New Zealand America’s Cup campaigner Jono McBeth on board as sailing team manager, while Red Bull designer Adrian Newey would later also join to lead design and engineering.
Has it been plain sailing?
Not quite. Despite significant Government investment of £7.5m to support the redevelopment of Portsmouth Harbour for the team’s headquarters on the Camber, there was a continuing drive for significant commercial sponsorship deals to keep on course for a shot at the America’s Cup.Land Rover fronted the successful 2015/2016 World Series campaign which included a stage win in Portsmouth, where Prince William joined his wife to help cheer the British team on.However, hopes of making the showpiece 2017 America’s Cup races in Bermuda were dashed by defeat to Emirates Team New Zealand at the challenger semi-final stage.
How important has Ineos’ funding been?
Pivotal. The £110m deal, swiftly agreed in April 2018, had initially come about after Ineos chairman Jim Ratcliffe chatted with Ainslie over a beer in a pub, having being introduced through a mutual friend.It certainly has proved money well spent, both in and out of the water.The size of the investment, the biggest in British sailing history, provided the financial clout needed for building and testing two foiling monohull boats as well as allowing Ainslie to retain key personnel – including chief executive Grant Simmer, a four-time America’s Cup winner and chief designer Nick Holroyd – while fellow former Olympic champion Giles Scott would later take on the role of head of sailing.However, the team endured a difficult World Series, which was cut to just one event in Auckland during December 2020 because of the Covid-19 pandemic, before then also coming up short against Italy’s Luna Rossa in the 2021 Prada Cup qualifying regatta.
In December 2019, another crucial partnership was agreed with a division of the Mercedes Motorsport F1 team, based in Brackley, Northamptonshire.The ground-breaking collaboration, which also included Ineos Grenadiers cycling team, has seen work together in areas such as engineering, human science, simulation and data analysis to help identify performance gains.The designers of the 2024 Britannia contender boat moved to an airfield near the Brackley headquarters, which had a hangar big enough for the build and to make full use of Mercedes’ state-of-the-art facilities along with engineering expertise.With live race data crunched by the Sailing Support Room, Ainslie made a point to dedicate the Louis Vuitton Cup triumph to “a lot of people back in Brackley”, who had all helped develop their AC75 yacht to be a cut above as Great Britain reached the America’s Cup for the first time since Tony Boyden’s Sovereign challenge in 1964.
