Thirty Knots, With the Wind at Your Wings

THE CHAMP: The America’s Cup defender Alinghi 5, a catamaran with two hulls and a mast almost 200 feet tall, practicing last month in Valencia, Spain

By HENRY FOUNTAIN
NYT

VALENCIA, Spain — USA-17, the challenger for the America’s Cup, and Alinghi 5, the defender, may be stripped-down, lean racing machines, built purely for speed. But both are fully loaded.

Loaded, that is, with compressive and tensile stresses in an exquisitely choreographed dance of struts, spars and cables. Made almost entirely of carbon fiber, the enormous multihulls — USA-17 has three hulls, Alinghi 5 two — are about as delicate as a house of cards. If a big enough element were to break, the whole thing could fall apart.

That could be disastrous, considering that the boats, with masts that tower a couple of hundred feet above the water, are capable of speeds of 30 knots, about 35 miles per hour, or more.

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