CHICAGO – Competition for the 140-year-old America’s Cup goes beyond national pride, prowess with helm and winch, or the exhilaration of knifing a sleek sailing machine across a stiff breeze on a rolling sea.

Technological advances made in the America’s Cup competition will influence the design and material composition of boats, airplanes and all other modes of transportation that must take into account weight, strength and wind resistance.

“Clearly what we learn in construction and materials technology will flow to the rest of the sport,” said John Marshall, general manager of the Partnership for America’s Cup Technology, or PACT, a technological resource pool supporting United States syndicates competing for the cup.

“The America’s Cup is such an intense research environment that everything that affects boat speed gets worked on,” Marshall said.

“Unlike other sporting events, the America’s Cup is a technology test, which happens to take place in sailboats,” said Tom Ehman, general manager of the America’s Cup Organizing Committee. “It is a question of which country can marshal the designers and engineers to design a vessel to get around the course in ever-changing conditions in the shortest period of time.”

The upcoming America’s Cup will feature a new class of sailboat, appropriately dubbed the International America’s Cup Class sailboat, or IACC.

The IACC will make its racing debut next week in the waters off San Diego.

`Worlds’ start Saturday

The International America’s Cup Class World Championships begin Saturday. The “Worlds” will include five days of fleet racing with nine boats from six countries competing. It will be the first regatta in the new class of boat.

After a free day, there will be a day of match racing, one-on-one competition between the top four contenders, then match race finals to determine the world champion.

The 28th America’s Cup competition begins in February 1992 with a series of races off San Diego to determine the foreign challenger and the U.S. defender. The actual race will be in May 1992.

The IACC sailboats will replace the 12-meters that had been used from 1958 through 1987.

The straightforward name for the new boats may signal an attempt by the sailing powers that be to simplify what has become an increasingly complex sport.

One would think that on a 12-meter boat, something would be 12 meters high, or wide, or long. Not so. The number “12” must be the result of a mathematical formula.

Similarly, the new boat has to meet a formula; using the logic that gave rise to the name “12-meter,” the new design could be called a “42-meter” sailboat.

For those with a fetish for detail, here is the formula:

Take the length of the boat in meters and add 1.25. Multiply that by the square root of the sail area (in square meters), then subtract 9.8 and multiply the result by the cube root of the displacement (the weight of the water displaced by the craft’s hull). Then divide the result by .388. The result must equal 42.

Got that? If not, just keep in mind that the real story behind the new design formula is more power and speed.

The IACC racer will be about 75 feet long, with a beam, or width, of 18 feet and a mast height of 110 feet. The crew of 16 is an increase over the 12-meter, which carried 11 people. The additional crew will be needed, given the increased size of the sails and the new and more complex race course.

“We are developing design tools and computer programs. We are interacting with the aerospace industry and the Navy on applying the tools and methods that are used in designing aircraft, submarines and surface ships,” said Marshall, who is an Olympic bronze medalist in sailing.

“To apply what is learned in the America’s Cup to commercial fields, we are tapping into the technology, the software and hardware, of the computer,” Marshall said.

“In sail racing you are looking to the last fraction of 1 percent of speed,” he said. “As we work with the people, we find they are very interested in applying their computer codes and tools in an environment where they are going to be tested very hard and subjected to some real analysis and validation.

“In sail racing, you find out quickly if you are right or wrong,” Marshall noted. “You go out there and either win or lose.”

High-tech sponsors

The major corporate sponsors of PACT are high-tech companies such as Science Applications International Corp., Boeing Aircraft and International Business Machines Corp. They work closely with the design team to provide technical assistance as well as funding.

The group, Marshall said, is using computer technology normally used to design wings of airplanes to design keels and rudders of the sailboats.

“Certainly technology does not get invented for our sport, but those existing technologies are often in their infancy,” said Ehman of the America’s Cup Organizing Committee. “People get involved in this fun sport, in a game, and they become more familiar with the technology and figure out more creative uses, not only in the marine industry, but in our day-to-day lives.”

For example, Ehman said, the aerospace industry benefits as America’s Cup research promotes continued miniaturization of computers, advanced navigational systems and ever-lighter but stronger materials.

There is much in common between flying and sailing. An aircraft wing is shaped to make the air passing over it travel a longer distance. As the air accelerates, it reduces pressure on top of the wing and creates lift, which allows the aircraft to fly.

The mast and sails of a boat act like a wing. They are shaped to create a low-pressure area, and the lift created by the sail is translated into forward motion by the shape of the keel, the weighted projection on the bottom of the craft that keeps it from capsizing or slipping sideways.

The America’s Cup boats will rely on design work from computer predictions, but will be backed up with wind tunnel experiments.

The process helps the companies in PACT, too.

“The experiments will validate computer predictions, and you find out exactly how good the computer programs are,” Marshall said.

“A computer program is a simplification from nature, but does not include all the features of the real situation,” he said. “It is something that can be very useful, but is something you have to be skeptical about. By doing what we do in the America’s Cup, we can feed back into a company like Boeing a better understanding of the limitations of their design tools.”

As a result, Marshall added, “What we learn will feed back to improve their understanding of how wings work on miltary and commercial aircraft.”

New materials also are getting close study. “This is the first time that carbon fiber construction will be the basic construction material,” Marshall said. “The 12-meters were aluminum boats.”

The IACC boats have a composite construction consisting of a core of lightweight material covered with an inner and outer skin of very strong carbon fiber material.

“We see military aircraft with substantial use of composites – the Stealth planes are almost entirely composite,” Marshall said. “Most sailboats are made of fiberglass, but we are going to see carbon fiber and Kevlar used more broadly because of its high strength-to-weight ratio.”

Strong stuff

Pound for pound, Kevlar is stronger than steel, although it’s much lighter; the material is used to make bullet-proof vests.

“In terms of the rig, the big and obvious change is that the masts and spars are going to be carbon fiber. I see that having direct application in cruising boats very soon,” said Marshall, who also is executive vice president of Hinkley Co. in Maine, which makes large cruising sailboats.

“With carbon fiber you can get the same strength for half the weight; it is about twice as strong for its weight as aluminum,” he said.

Carbon fiber masts will help reduce weight high on the boat; the result will be a more stable sailboat, because the center of balance will be lower.

“Sailboat design and construction in general benefits from the experimentation and knowledge gained from applying the new technology,” said Bruce Nelson, a designer for Team Dennis Conner, one of two American syndicates hoping to defend the Cup next year. “It has been a traditional role of the America’s Cup to advance yacht designs.”

Developments in areas such as hardware are less glamorous than the winged keels developed in competition in the early 1980s, Nelson noted.

“If we go back a number of years, the development of the coffee-grinder winch systems was done in America’s Cup boats,” Marshall said. “We now see link systems to put six or eight people grinding to pull in the same sail. The new boats will be using a system where you have a number of winches that can be driven off the same set of pedestals.”

Ehman added, “Technologies that have been used for some time on America’s Cup boats are now finding their ways, not only to the recreational boating market, but into things like the onboard computer and navigational systems they are talking about putting into personal automobiles. It is the same technology that down the road will be showing up in wrist watches for backpackers and in your personal automobile.”

All the design, equipment and materials receive their ultimate tests on the water, where a new racecourse will provide a real proving ground for skill and seamanship.

The 26-mile race course has eight legs and includes an “S” lap, a hairpin turn and a downwind finish, with the wind coming from behind. The first leg of the race is 4.25 miles straight into the wind; this is called a beat as the sailboats aim as close as possible to the direction of the wind without heading straight into it, which would cause the boat to stop.

The boats round the first mark and head straight downwind, on what is called a run, back toward the starting point. Here the craft hit their top speeds, nearing 20 miles an hour, and use their largest sail, the colorful 4,500 square-foot spinnaker.

Back at the starting point, the third leg is a shorter 3.5-mile beat where the boat should be able to reach speeds of around 13 m.p.h.

The fourth, fifth and sixth legs each are relatively short and combine to form a large S-shaped track just over seven miles in length. At the end of the S, the boats must execute a 240-degree hairpin turn, then head upwind for a final 3.5-mile beat.

The last leg is a downwind run and, with spinnakers flying, should make for an exciting and colorful finish.