Video: Land Rover and Ben Ainslie discuss the fastest America’s Cup boat with Land Rover BAR

Watch as in an unprecedented move, Land Rover reveals the technical areas of collaboration currently in development to help create the fastest America’s Cup boat with Land Rover BAR.

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It’s atypical for a team set to win the America’s Cup to release any information about the technicalities of their craft ahead of the first 2016 event of the Louis Vuitton America’s Cup World Series in Oman, Muscat (26-28 February) but Land Rover and Sir Ben Ainslie have done just that in a fascinating video.

 

Land Rover is applying its design, technology and innovation expertise to the America’s Cup Class boat, a multihull catamaran code-named ‘R1’. The boat, weighing over two tonnes, will be capable of speeds in excess of 50knots thanks to a technique known as foiling where the boat lifts clear out of the water to fly on hydrofoils, reducing drag and increasing boat speed and efficiency.

land rover bar 2016 

With less than 11 months until the launch, the Land Rover Advanced Engineering team has been working in collaboration with Land Rover BAR’s designers and engineers, developing a series of prototype test boats. The results of the development process will be applied to designing the world’s fastest America’s Cup Class boat.

 

“Since the birth of foiling, one of the biggest challenges is understanding how to control these massively powerful machines whilst balancing on a comparatively small surface area. We have delved into our talent base at Jaguar Land Rover to identify the most skilled engineers within the fields of aerodynamics, machine learning and advanced data processing which are an integral part of the workstreams with Land Rover BAR. The ocean is new terrain for us and we plan to apply our findings into the final boat design across the next 11-months and ultimately back into our own research and development units.”, said Tony Harper, Head of Research at Jaguar Land Rover.

The Land Rover BAR team head to the Oman leg of Louis Vuitton America’s Cup World Series in third position on 26-28 February.