America's Cup - a waste of time, or will I benefit?

1:51 AM Mon 22 Feb 2010 GMT

'Oracle doing what she does best' .

Was the America's Cup a waste of time? Years of wrangling and then just two races? Were you 'over it' by the time of the tenth court visit? Aaron Kuriloff suggests that cruising sailors might benefit in the future from the extravagances of the lead up to the race:

The America's Cup boats -products of a technological showdown between billionaire sailors-may bring wings, ultralight hulls, and computers to the next generation of sailboats.

The two-year legal battle between billionaires Larry Ellison of Oracle (ORCL) and Ernesto Bertarelli, who sold his family's Swiss biotech business to Merck (MRK) for $13.3 billion in 2007, has produced two racing yachts that are a decade ahead of any boat built previously, even as the legal tussle has dogged and delayed the 158-year-old regatta, finally held off the coast of Spain. The innovations, which came about as they forced race organizers to abandon longstanding rules, may one day benefit sailors on weekend jaunts.

Designers for both Ellison's BMW-Oracle Racing team and Bertarelli's Alinghi syndicate say building and learning to sail these boats, each at least 90 feet long and among the fastest yachts ever built, has meant gains in everything from data collection to sail technology.

'We're like kids in the candy shop,' says Dirk Kramers, chief engineer for the Cup-defending Alinghi catamaran. 'During the last Cup, it was all about trying to squeeze another 1/100th of a knot out of the boat. Now we're really in discovery mode, learning huge lessons every day. We get to work on boats that are just so much more exciting than anything that's ever been done.'

A Decade of Advances in Two Years:

Pete Melvin, a U.S. Olympic sailor and world champion, co-founded Morrelli & Melvin Design & Engineering, which has designed multihulls, including Steve Fossett's record-setting PlayStation, and has consulted for BMW-Oracle. Multihulls are much faster than monohull boats, because they are lighter and have less drag.

'It's been a hugely concentrated development, with all the best people in the industry, plus outside experts in every field, all focused on pushing the edge of the envelope,' he says. 'It normally would have taken eight or 10 years to do what's been done in just two short years.'

The America's Cup has long featured yachting's cutting edge. The 1983 victor, Australia II, used wings on its keel to reduce drag and increase performance. Such wings, so secret at the time that it took two undercover frogmen to spot them, are now common on sailboats worldwide.

Are you on your way to being convinced? Click here to read more of the argument in Bloomberg's Business Week.

by Sail-World/Aaron Kuriloff

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America's Cup - a waste of time, or will I benefit?

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