Emirates Team New Zealand plan to have their AC75, Te Aihe, back on the Hauraki Gulf next week but behind closed doors designers are working round the clock to finish their race boat.
Head designer Dan Bernasconi is the man facing the deadline to deliver.
“We're halfway through the build of what will be our race boat and we have over 30 designers now and we tend to leave things to the last possible minutes so we have as much time developing the r and d and design as possible,” Bernasconi said.
Te Aihe was launched in September but in the last few months it has been the "mini-me" Te Kahu, which has been crucial in developing the race boat concept.
“It’s actually a really cool platform for testing a lot of ideas and it's smaller so you can do things more quickly,” he said.
Speed is at the heart of everything, which is why the sailing team led by Peter Burling is also heavily invested in the design process.
“At the end of the day the sailors have to go sail it so it's kind of real thing what we're feeling on the water and the direction we want to go with the design in terms of how we operate the boat,” Burling said.
That boat's about to have company on the Hauraki Gulf with American Magic's Defiant set to arrive this weekend, a prospect that excites both Burling and Bernasconi.
“Really raise that level of intensity down here having another boat a few hundred metres away that you're eventually going to have to race against,” Burling said.
Just as it is in Formula One you're kind of watching your competitors and trying to get good ideas and then bringing them together into something coherent on your boat,” Bernasconi said.
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