There is a certain logic to how Thursday's session on the Hauraki Gulf played out. For the better part of four hours, Emirates Team New Zealand put their AC75 through deliberate discomfort, probing the low end of the foiling speed range, inducing stalls, testing rudder limits, and loading up sails in a breeze that stayed variable and margins that stayed tight. When the tack of the Code J3.2 jib let go shortly after 1300hrs, releasing the sail from the forestay and sending carbon battens clattering against the mast, the moment looked dramatic. In another sense, it was the session doing exactly what had been asked of it.
Co-helm Chris Draper, standing in for regular helm Seb Menzies while Menzies competes at the 49er World Championships in Quiberon, France, was philosophical about the failure. "That's part and parcel of pushing the structures on this boat and the sails," he said. "One of those things."
There is, however, a complicating detail behind that measured response. The sails being put under those loads are legacy equipment carried over from the 2024 America's Cup campaign, originally built to survive a single Cup cycle and now being asked to perform across a second. As Richard Gladwell noted in his recon report, breakages of this kind, while uncommon for ETNZ, "may increase across all teams" as the Protocol's requirement to race on legacy equipment continues to bite. What appears at first glance to be a routine test failure may prove to be an early sign of a pressure point the whole fleet will be managing as AC38 preparations gather pace.
The broken jib aside, the session offered a revealing window into where ETNZ's development focus currently sits. Recon observers recorded the team repeatedly entering what was described as a "high slow mode," holding elevated ride heights at reduced boat speeds to map the outer edge of sustained flight. Takeoff speeds in the 14 to 15 knot range were noted, with the port foil's stall limit sitting somewhere between 16 and 18 knots. Downwind speeds still climbed into the mid-30s when the team let the boat run, but outright pace was not the point. The objective was understanding precisely where control starts to break down, and what the boat is doing as it approaches those limits.
Tell-tales on the foil arm trailing edges, combined with a camera trained on the junction between the foil arm and the wing foil, pointed to a team as attentive to water behaviour around the foils as to the figures on any speed display. Since the previous session, an additional Starlink unit had appeared on the communications pod, and battery swaps were carried out at regular intervals through the afternoon, a reminder of how data-intensive modern test programmes have become.
Wind conditions added their own complexity. Morning breezes of 6 to 8 knots built into a 12 to 15 knot range through the afternoon, keeping the environment variable enough that the team held onto the J3.2 longer than they might otherwise have. The Cunningham load applied to keep the sail working through the stronger gusts was likely a contributing factor in the eventual failure.
By 1515hrs the AC75 was under tow back up the harbour. Rather than fit a replacement jib and continue, the crew opted to carry out a thorough rig check. Draper confirmed that the independent forestay had functioned as intended and that no structural or rig damage appeared to have resulted.
Testing is set to resume on Monday, with a replacement jib ready to go. The wider question of how much load legacy equipment can reasonably be expected to absorb as the AC38 build-up deepens is one the whole fleet may find itself wrestling with before long.
