America’s Cup, Artemis Racing starts the construction of the new boat

Goteborg – While Artemis Racing’s design and build group continues to operate in Alameda, CA, and the team’s sailing operation is fully underway in Bermuda, but the team has also been quietly building its footprint back home in Sweden.

“We’ve been in Sweden to build the hulls and bows of our America’s Cup Class Yacht, because under the America’s Cup Protocol, the challenging teams need to build at least the bow portion, approximately 3m long, in their country of origin.The boat is primarily constructed out of 150 gram – 300 gram uni fibres, and the hull is one design, meaning every team will have exactly the same shaped hull. Although there are a couple of areas that you are allowed to play with, to the average spectator, the boats will look exactly the same”, commented Artemis Racing‘s, Brandon Linton.

The build took place at Sune Carlsson Båtvarv, next to KSSS in Saltsjöbaden, just outside Stockholm. Much like large parts of the team’s campaign, it was kept behind closed doors, making it as hard as possible for opponents to copy, or get ideas, regarding the construction process.

Building a competitive America’s Cup yacht takes patience and millimetre precision. Once all the components were ready, they were put into a gigantic specialist oven that had been shipped over the Atlantic from San Francisco, to Saltsjöbaden.

“We used an oven modified from the last America’s Cup, the one that the AC72 was built in. It has four electric burners that basically, cook the hull, between 85 and 90 degrees celsius, and when it’s not an oven, it’s a temperature controlled environment that the guys can work in.”

Artemis Racing has already built two 45ft Turbo development boats, but the final boat being built will be nearly 50ft in length. At this critical time in the campaign, less than a year away from the first official race, there is no room for mistakes in either design or construction. All challengers are restricted to building just one race yacht each, and are not allowed to launch until 150 days before the start of the America’s Cup Challenger Series, taking place in May 2017.

“Everything has to be precise, there are lots of control measures that we put in place. The materials we’re using are very temperature sensitive, if you do not take care when you’re using these materials, you can have catastrophic failures, meaning ending up with a part that will be unusable. You’ve just got to make sure it is built correctly, to the plan specified, and make sure that you don’t make a mistake along the way”.

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