America's Cup - The other half of the AC75 design team

by Suzanne McFadden, Newsroom on 21 Nov 2017 Newsroom's Suzanne McFadden, a long time America's Cup correspondent talks with Elise Beavis, the engineering graduate who joined Emirates Team New Zealand straight from University and spent three years working on the Cyclor development project among others.

Now she is working fulltime on the AC75 concept and development of the AC75 class rule

Since winning the America’s Cup, Emirates Team New Zealand have had just two designers working full-time on conceiving a yacht, the like of which has never been sailed before.

One of them is Dan Bernasconi, the team’s technical director, with a glittering 25-year design career that includes working for McLaren’s Formula One team.

The other is 23-year-old Elise Beavis, a talented sailor in her youth, who came fresh out of university in late 2015 to join one of the most successful sports teams in the world. It doesn’t seem to bother Beavis that her boss was solving engineering problems well before she was born.

“I’m quite a lot younger than other people here; a new grad who’s not an expert in any area. But they’ve trusted me to do my job right,” she says. “I know I’m pretty lucky to have been given this opportunity.”

But Team NZ reckon the good fortune is theirs. Bernasconi says the team couldn’t wait to get Beavis – with her technical engineering nous and practical sailing knowledge - back on board for the 2021 America’s Cup defence. Her work in the last campaign, which included making the pedalling cyclors as aerodynamic as possible, certainly contributed to the victory in Bermuda.

“A lot of the other guys wanted to have a break after the last Cup, but she was massively enthusiastic to get back into it. And we’re really happy to have her back full-time,” says Bernasconi.

While he’s been in Europe this past fortnight finalising the design of the new fully foiling 75ft monohull with the Italian Luna Rossa team, Bernasconi has left Beavis holding the ropes back in Auckland.

The Team NZ base in Silo Park is a ghost of its former self. Most days, there are no more than 12 people rattling around inside the two-storeyed office and the swarm of shipping containers outside.

When Beavis meets you at the gate, in a Team NZ shirt and cut-off shorts, it’s clear she’s not the reserved, intense boffin you might imagine a specialist in Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) to be.

With engaging green eyes and an easy laugh, she speaks in a knowledgeable, yet understandable, way about the new boat – which is still little more than an animation, but has already put the sailing world in a spin.

“While the boat is totally different than anything we’ve seen before – with plenty of innovation and new stuff to come - it’s really been designed with the thought of how it could trickle down to mum-and-dad sailors cruising around the harbour.'

The AC75 fully foiling monohull looks spectacular even in its virtual form – with its revolutionary twin canting T-foils that look like the legs of a Jesus Christ lizard running across water, and its ability to self-right in a capsize.

It’s also a bit of a chameleon, Beavis points out. At the dock, she says, the boat will look like a mainstream monohull. “But on the water it can take off and go as fast as – and possibly faster than - the AC50 catamaran. It’s going to be pretty exciting for everyone,” she says.

“It’s really the right boat for the event. We looked at a lot of different boats, right across the spectrum. We tried various compromises between what conventional sailing people want, and what people who love the AC50 cats like.

“But that just didn’t work. There is no happy medium. You had to go fully conventional, or fully foiling. And by going fully foiling, there’s a lot of room for development going forward.”

Although Beavis and Bernasconi are currently the only full-time members of the design team, eight other designers from Team NZ’s last campaign have worked part-time on creating this boat. There has also been collaboration from Luna Rossa designers in Italy.

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