America’s Cup 35th: Artemis Push Button Foiling Explained II
When I first saw the control panel of Artemis AC50 (and overall conf for the rest of the teams) I thought it was too much trim tech involved for sailing as a sport. Nathan Outteridge in this new video shows a little more insight on his ‘end user’ experience.
In the end buttons or not, still an immense challenge handling the AC50s power, and definitely a job for few sailors, if not few humans, in this planet being able to control all systems and also looking forward to tactics and win each race towards the Cup finals. Tech , design & build crew work is superb, system and variables should more complex than standard aeronautics.
I still think AC45 F and GC32 sailing style from a sailors skills and efforts perspective is the ultimate pinnacle for sailing as a sport. I’m not an AC History expert but all tech driven and innovation were put in place to make faster, lighter , more efficient designs and surely to aid sailors tasks onboard but not to actually replace the crew work on trimming the boat.
Same comparison can be made with Fangio days in the F1 vs all the automatic control current cars have. Still Nathan has to push the right buttons at the right time, hope still to be the case for next Cup and not to start taking buttons out of the panel to be replaced for full automatic flight and control systems.