This week they will go out to sea as many days as possible because some of the crew are competing in other regattas in the coming weeks. The AC75 with which the home team, Emirates Team New Zealand, won the last edition of the America’s Cup has been testing for a few days what will be the Barcelona regatta course next year.
Some seventy members of the host team are already working at the base divided between the old Balearia terminal and the 2,700-square-meter warehouse built next to it, where they keep the boat, named Te Rehutai (sea breeze in Maori). The technical and sports team is in permanent contact with the Auckland base, where it is now winter and where they are working on the new AC75 with which the team will defend the America’s Cup in Barcelona next year.
At the base of Barcelona, ??between one building and the other (the old Balearia terminal and the hangar), a crane lifts the AC75, weighing six tons, from land to water and vice versa. The team of mechanics supervises the operation on a daily basis. “Every day we have certain goals set for training,” Grant Dalton explained this morning before the daily departure, in which the helmsmen Pete Burling and Nathan Outteridge have made this Formula 1 fly from the sea. Depending on the objectives, the training lasts more or less hours.
The base of the Kiwi team in Barcelona is already fully operational. The gym for athletes, the simulator (in which the crew spends hours every day), the room full of screens and computers where designers, engineers, mechanics and the crew themselves work, have been located in the building of the old Balearia terminal. in the development of the boats to improve their performance at sea to the limit, developing their own software and in permanent contact with the team that still works from Auckland.
In the hangar, the logistics deployment has culminated. Added to the transport of the boat are twelve containers in which the necessary material for the maintenance and improvement of these cutting-edge boats has been transported and now, installed inside the ship, each one has its specific function. At the moment, the training is being done with the AC75, but the team awaits the arrival, scheduled for a few weeks, of the AC40 Te Kakahi (La Orca), launched on February 23 and which will be the one to compete in the first preliminary regatta in Vilanova i la Geltrú, which will be held between September 14 and 17.
