What it’s really like on an America’s Cup boat
Design hits high speeds when Tudor creates a watch for the Alinghi Red Bull Racing team ahead of the next America’s Cup.
It’s 11am in Barcelona and I am careening across the Mediterranean in a speed boat. Our captain, a salty leather twine of a man, says we’re going about 30 knots. The boat we’re “chasing” is the AC40 training boat for the Alinghi Red Bull Racing team, Switzerland’s challengers for the world’s oldest sailing race, the America’s Cup – the next iteration of which will be held in Barcelona in 2024. In a race, these yachts, true marvels of engineering, can hit speeds of up to 53 knots. They quite literally get up on the boat’s “foils” (hydraulically operated fins that lift the boat off the water) and fly.
Designing a watch to factor in speeds like this with the requirements of a team who are pushed to their physical limits in both training and competition, along with the necessities of things such as waterproofing and lightness, legibility and accuracy, proved a compelling challenge for the Tudor watch designers tasked with doing so.
The Swiss watch brand became the main sponsor for the Alinghi Red Bull Racing team – which in 2003 was the first European team to win the America’s Cup – in 2022. No small feat given Switzerland is a land-locked country. It has proven a fitting alignment. Partly because some of the materials, such as a new carbon composite, titanium and stainless steel used in the additions to its Pelagos mechanical dive watch range – the Pelagos FXD Alinghi Red Bull Racing Edition and Pelagos FXD Chrono Alinghi Red Bull Racing Edition – are the same as those used on the AC40 training boats, and the AC75 boat that the team will race in Barcelona next year. Both represent ideas of pushing technology, time and motion forward.
Tudor’s head of design, Ander Ugarte, says the design process for the watches, launched in Barcelona in June, was incredibly collaborative. “The Alinghi Red Bull racing team gave us the brief of the kind of watch they needed for the race here in Barcelona,” he says. “We spoke about materials and different technical elements that you can find on the watch.”
It includes features particularly useful for professional sailors, such as a bi-directional bezel to use as a countdown function, which allows team members to calculate the time they have to be at the starting line. But Ugarte says they wanted a watch that would be as useful in a rigorous session in the gym as it would in tensioning the rig or other requisite daily tasks.
“They needed a waterproof watch, light, reliable, technically strong, and also the kind of bracelet they can put on top of their [wet]suits,” he says.
Challenges in making the watch came with working with the new carbon fibre material, and also the relatively fast turnaround – the watch was created in just under a year.
“It’s quite quick for a watch,” reiterates Ugarte, who has been with the brand for 15 years and involved in its major launches, including the Pelagos, which is named for the Greek word for “deep sea”, and the Black Bay. Last year the Pelagos FXD was named Best Diver’s Watch at the Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève. Meanwhile, in September this year Tudor launched a new Pelagos FXD timepiece with a unidirectional rotating bezel and both a rubber and green and red strap. The piece pays tribute to the Tudor watches worn by US navy divers since the mid-1950s.
All of these watches, it must be said, appeal equally to America’s Cup sailors or hardy adventurers who might need to use the functions of a dive watch on an expedition, and the desk divers of many a CBD office building who simply admire the aesthetics.
Ugarte says the new Pelagos FXD Alinghi Red Bull Racing Editions, sporty and jaunty, with an adjustable navy and red Velcro strap and matte blue dial on a 42 and 43mm dial, are “also for people who are looking for modern materials, high-tech materials … [and] people who love sailing, or the universe of racing”.
There is a chronograph (stopwatch) function in the 43mm version, which has two sub-dials and titanium pushers. It’s the first time this complication has been added to the Pelagos range. It’s also the first carbon fibre watch from Tudor (and indeed its sister company, Rolex). Both have a water resistance of 200m.
On the wrist the watch feels light and easy to wear – whether you’re a professional sailor or a mere pencil pusher. The synergy between design and function is a constant conversation between Ugarte and his team and the Tudor manufacture. It’s essential to the Alinghi Red Bull Racing team too. The team includes former Olympic rowers and cyclists as well as professional sailors, in keeping with the way racing relies less on such things as winching the sails and more on physical, mental and technical prowess.
Lucien Cujean, one of the team’s sailors, says this rigour is essential because a shot at winning the “Auld Mug” in the America’s Cup depends on how finely tuned the team is, physically and mentally. “In sailing, especially on these big boats, there were always some strong guys who you have to use,” he says. “I would say now you have to have some ‘smart muscles’ because they have to produce power, but they also have to react and understand what they are doing because it’s not just cycling or turning handles. They have to anticipate their energy before manoeuvres because we know that this manoeuvre will cost that much power.”
The Alinghi Red Bull Racing team were the first to set up camp for the America’s Cup in the Port Vell area of Barcelona, with the American, New Zealand and British teams moving in soon after. Here the team extends to 130, including the eight sailors on the boat (while there are another 30 team members in Ecublens, Switzerland, where the race day boat is being built).
Close up, the boats resemble something from a science fiction movie, especially when suspended in the giant boat sheds along the port. Climbing a ladder for a bird’s eye view inside is to realise how small the cockpits where the sailors sit are.
The morning we visited the team were testing new foils for the boat. Each new tweak involves a precise engineering calculation and is the kind of thing that excites Jaume Triay, an R&D engineer and at 22 the youngest on the team. He became a boat designer, he says, when as a boat-obsessed child he realised his chances of being a pirate were slim to none. It turns out there are parallels between watch and boat design – there are many moving parts and they all affect each other.
“As with any complex problem, there are many things that influence each other,” says Triay. “So that makes it especially difficult, because when you want to improve a certain component or a certain part that will have influence on every other component of the boat. You’ve got to have a global perception of how you want to do this thing.”
The impact of technology on the boats and the sport, he says, is significant. “The final product can evolve as long as the tools evolve,” he says. “One big concern is a safety factor. How much can you push your engineering product? How much you can push is how confident you are with your predictions. And your predictions come from technology. So if you have better technology, then you can make more accurate and better predictions and therefore you can push the boundaries of what’s possible.” All while you’re going absurdly fast.
As for Ugarte and the Tudor design team, the hope is that the watches too become part of history. “My hope is that this watch will go with the team Alinghi and be with them until the victory,” he says.
This story appears in the November issue of WISH Magazine, out now.
