If Sir Ben Ainslie needs any good omens when he considers Land Rover BAR’s challenge for the America’s Cup in two years’ time, he could reflect that Bermuda, where the Cup will be fought for, has always been a happy hunting ground for him.
This weekend Hamilton, Bermuda’s capital, hosts the third event in the America’s Cup World Series (ACWS), which the city is treating as something of a dress rehearsal for the main event in 2017.
Ainslie knows the waters well. As a teenager he became world youth champion there and also had two victories in three attempts in the Bermuda Gold Cup. With Land Rover BAR second in the standings behind Emirates Team New Zealand, the aim in the four races over two days will be to finish the year on top of the podium.
“Bermuda has always been good for me,” Ainslie said. “I first came here when I was 17-year-old and did the Youth World Championships here, which was on the same patch of water that the America’s Cup will be on.
“The course is a bit smaller and a bit closer to Hamilton than the America’s Cup racecourse. There is a great atmosphere. Hamilton is transforming itself for the America’s Cup and all the locals are so behind it, they are so excited to bring the Cup here and as competitors you really respond to that.”
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Having finished first in the truncated opening ACWS event in Portsmouth, things were tougher in Gothenburg. With practice limited in the boats limited to two days per event, none of the teams will have seen their identical AC45s since they were taken apart and put in container crates in Sweden.
“We felt we could have done better [in Gothenburg], but to be on the podium with a brand new team with the standard of fleet there is cannot be a total disappointment,” Ainslie said. “Everyone is getting better at sailing these boats, there is a really high standard. You have to come out and sail well and make no mistakes.”
This is the final ACWS event of the year and with next year’s calendar still incomplete, it is not clear when the next time BAR will see their rivals. A hard winter is ahead on the Solent, as testing continues in the development of a boat that will attempt to win the America’s Cup for Britain for the first time.
Two weeks ago, the team launched its second test boat, T2, the first boat designed and built at their new Portsmouth headquarters.
“It was a really big moment for the team, the boat builders and designers who work incredibly long hours to get it ready,” Ainslie said. “We are going to build a lot of them in the next 18 months so we didn’t want to get too symbolic about it, we just wanted to get the thing in the water and get on with it.
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“The testing we are going to do over this winter is going to be the hard yards to a certain extent. Like all sports, when you get out there competing, it all looks very glamorous, but there is a lot of work behind it that people see. We’ll get that hard work done and tick the boxes.”