“Look, we’re the underdogs in this, without a shadow of doubt,” Ben Ainslie told the UK’s Guardian Newspaper in a recent interview looking ahead to Saturday’s America’s Cup.

On the face of it, he’s not wrong. Ainslie’s crew (the first British team to make it to the America’s Cup in 60 years) are up against the reigning America’s Cup champions, and a country which can lay claim to four America’s Cup wins.

Not only are Team New Zealand the most successful America’s Cup team in modern history; when it comes to match racing on foils they are unrivalled.

The Kiwis were first to introduce hydrofoils into America’s Cup racing back in 2013 when they and their foiling 72ft catamaran got to within one win of wresting the America’s Cup from then Defender Oracle Team USA.

The following America’s Cup – by then sailed in 50ft foiling catamarans – the Kiwis won by a landslide.

In 2021, with the event sailed in the new AC75 foiling monohulls, they were imperious again, sweeping aside Luna Rossa Prada Pirelli to successfully defend.

A Luna Rossa team who, it must be noted, had crushed Ainslie’s INEOS Britannia 7-1 to secure their place in that America’s Cup.

Britain may famously love an underdog, and it seems that Ainslie’s INEOS team could yet again be the David going up against an all-conquering Goliath.

But if you put all that history to one side and focus on what we know just two days out from the start of racing, to my mind the most likely outcome is an incredibly close America’s Cup, much closer than 2017 or 2021.

The Boats

What is notable about this second generation of AC75 is how close the performance of the boats has been to date.

This is often the case when a rule set is allowed to mature as relative advantages shrink with every iteration of the class.

With Luna Rossa Prada Pirelli’s AC75, the Louis Vuitton Cup Final featured the challenger that was closest to Emirates Team New Zealand in design philosophy.

INEOS, by contrast, is arguably the furthest away from Emirates Team New Zealand (with American Magic being a more radical version of the New Zealand and Italian philosophy in pure hull concept).

In terms of hull philosophy, INEOS is the biggest and most-muscular looking boat in the fleet, while Emirates Team New Zealand favours more organic lines.

This certainly makes the British boat look – to the layman’s eye at least – less aerodynamically efficient. However, the team’s close cooperation with Mercedes F1 technologies, and use of their sophisticated aerodynamic and structural engineering tools, should have had a significant positive impact in this area.

In the words of America’s Cup designer Thomas Tison speaking to Yachting World, ‘it looks as though the British boat has been designed to both reduce drag and maximise lift.”

In flat water the British AC75’s significant skeg (or bustle) allows it to sail just kissing the water, sealing the gap between sea and water, maximising an ‘end plate’ effect, which is (very simply) aerodynamically beneficial to the sail package.

In wavy conditions we have seen the British team needing to sail with more leeward heel in order to keep this larger skeg / bustle out of the water.

The Emirates Team New Zealand boat is, in many ways, a further refinement of the AC75 that won them the last America’s Cup.

The team’s approach appears to have focussed around a meticulous attention to detail, such as the removal of vertical surfaces and the streamlining of the deck comings. These changes, while seemingly minor, should collectively contribute to significant performance gains.

Article continues below…

Team New Zealand’s skeg / bustle, is also designed to prevent wind from passing underneath the boat, making best use of the end plate effect.

However, theirs is significantly smaller than the INEOS design, which makes it less efficient in ideal conditions, but also less likely to hit the water when it’s wavy. As such when the sea state is up, the Kiwis will not need to sail with the same leeward heel (and thus slight righting moment loss) as the Brits.

The Foils

Foils are the area about which we have the least information, especially when it comes to the New Zealand boat, as the teams have to declare what they are using, but they otherwise remain very closely guarded secrets

From what I’ve seen to date, it looks as though the Kiwis and the Brits are the two teams with the smallest foils – certainly the Brits had the smallest foils of the challengers.

Smaller foils mean less drag but less stability. Top speeds should be higher, and downwind performance should be better – but staying on the foils is likely to be harder and manoeuvrability can be limited.

But it’s important to remember that the drag tradeoff every team has to make when designing their foils can be counterbalanced by the drag tradeoff that teams can make in their sail plans.

Luna Rossa, for example, seemed to have larger (and therefore higher drag) foils than INEOS, but their sail control looked to be better and they were able to flatten their sails better to reduce sail drag once foiling. This led to similar performance just from a different direction – higher drag foils, lower drag sails.

Both the Brits and the Kiwis feature a bulb on the foils in order to put enough weight into them to measure under the rules. Without these bulbs they would need much fatter foils with enough internal volume to add weight to measure, which would therefore be draggier over their total span.

Both boats have also added rule-required weight at the base of the foil arm. Here, New Zealand has a similar solution to Luna Rossa with a large bulb protruding forward from the foil arm, above the water when the boat is foiling normally.

INEOS’s solution is for large ‘ears’ on the trailing edge of their foils which will be in the water more often, but will be less draggy when they are submerged.

In the wavier conditions of the Louis Vuitton Final we saw these bulbs on Luna Rossa hitting the water often and they looked particularly slow during those moments.

Sail controls

The hulls are the most obvious difference between teams, and once they are racing differences in the foils are fairly easy to spot. But more tricky is the difference in sails and controls as much of this is hidden between the two sail skins.

As mentioned in the Louis Vuitton Cup Final it looked as though Luna Rossa had better control of their mainsail at the foot of the sail than INEOS, the latter often having a very full foot, which translates into drag at speed.

Since its launch, one of the standout aspects of Emirates Team New Zealand’s new boat is in the operation of its twin-skin mainsail. Specifically, the way in which the team has integrated the mainsail hydraulic systems within the sole of the boat.

“Unlike other teams that house these systems on the deck, Team New Zealand has managed to embed them below, reducing the aerodynamic drag and the weight above the waterline,” Tisson explained to us in his analysis of the boat.

But it’s also thought that they have a much more refined control of the two skins individually than other teams, allowing them better control of the mainsail shape.

A great deal of software exists on these boats and a number of things have been set up to be, essentially, pushbutton. Modes like high mode or bear aways, or speed build after tacks are pre-programmed and selected by trimmers to provide the broad parameters within which they will fine-tune.

And here the Brits may have an advantage. It is well known that all the data from their boat and from race days is being pumped back to the Mercedes F1 factory in Brackley, UK where they are parsing it in real time and making software and other instrument adjustments to improve performance from day to day – at a minimum. It’s believed the team can even work on some of the data race-to-race if the gap between races is large enough.

Of course F1 is all about analysing, understanding and utilising data, so there is almost nowhere in the world better for this undertaking – and is a clear contributing factor to INEOS’ constant improvement to date.

Ainslie Vs Burling

Though all we’ve discussed so far is technological improvements, if the boats are close, the sailors will be the ones to make a difference.

Much is new in modern America’s Cup racing and in 2024 for all teams bar Luna Rossa – who invented the concept for 2021 – having two helmsmen is another wholly new development.

In 2024 duties have been shared on all the AC75s between the four team members on either side of the boat – a port and starboard skipper, port and starboard trimmer, and corresponding cyclor teams.

Billing this match up as Ben Ainslie Vs Peter Burling does a huge disservice to their two co-skippers of Dylan Fletcher and Nathan Outteridge.

But as effective team leaders, and starboard-tack helmsmen, Ainslie and Burling will be largely responsible for decision making in the pre-start – always a key part of America’s Cup match racing.

In the Louis Vuitton Cup Final against Luna Rossa, INEOS was clearly the aggressor in each start and walked away with the series win.

But it should be noted that Luna Rossa were not looking to engage in the start box, despite having one of the world’s best match racers, Jimmy Spithill, as their starboard-tack skipper.

Quite why the decision was made to not engage in the start box remains unclear. It could well be that Luna Rossa saw some strength in INEOS (for example they thought the Brits were more manoeuvrable).

Equally it could be that a perceived upwind speed weakness of the Brits made an even start more desirable for Luna Rossa. The Brits have not often shown a strong ‘high mode’ so are less of a threat if they are to leeward off a startline than they might otherwise be.

Whatever the reason, INEOS go into the America’s Cup match having roundly beaten a very strong team in the crucial pre-start more often than not, and much of that can be attributed to Ainslie’s match racing aggression.

“I’m quite sure that the Kiwis are fast, but Ben is also fast and the thing that Ben has got up his sleeve is he’s such a match racer and he’s got a lot of match experience under his belt that the Kiwis don’t,” AC veteran and 2024 regatta director Iain Murray recently told Reuters.

For his part, Burling came into America’s Cup racing as a generational high performance boat talent. He was the best Olympic 49er helmsman the class had seen for many years and he and long-term sailing partner Blair Tuke won every event they entered in the four-year build up to their gold in the 2016 Olympics.

Because the New Zealander got into America’s Cup racing so early (aged just 26 at his first Cup in 2017 in Bermuda) he does not have the long match racing pedigree as someone like Ainslie or Spithill.

Time and again Burling’s match racing prowess has been called into question ahead of America’s Cups. And time and again the deadpan Kiwi has proved more than up to the task.

The two Cup wins to date have been in far better machinery than their opposition (and as the saying goes, a fast boat makes a good tactician) but he’s never looked out of his depth in the cut and thrust of competition.

Burling may be considered the high performance talent of his generation, but Outteridge is every bit as quick and the two were training partners in the lead up to the 2012 Olympics where Outteridge took 49er gold and Burling silver.

In 2016 after all that 49er dominance it was Burling who took gold, but Outteridge who took silver, so the pair are very evenly matched. And Outteridge was every bit as effective on the foiling 50ft catamarans in 2017, his Artemis team simply did not have the pace to get to the America’s Cup final.

The newest skipper in this Cup by quite some way is Dylan Fletcher. Most assumed Giles Scott would be Ainslie’s co-skipper in this edition and it was Scott who had done much of the co-skippering to date.

Scott also took on the role of tactician in the 2021 America’s Cup regatta. But Fletcher’s skill and tenacity saw him selected shortly before the Round Robin racing began as Ainslie’s co-skipper.

Fletcher is the same breed of sailor as Burling and Outteridge and comes from a 49er background Like both of them, he has also spent plenty of time sailing foiling Moths (he was World Champion in 2022). Clearly, Fletcher brings a high performance edge to the boat.

It’s also worth noting that Fletcher and his GBR 49er crew Stuart Bithell took gold in the class at the 2021 Olympic Games in Tokyo, beating Burling and Tuke into silver. Knowing you beat your opposition in the last biggest event you sailed will certainly go some way to removing the perception of invincibility from the Kiwi team.

Follow all of our 2024 America’s Cup coverage