Gadgetory

you welcome to top shelf my name is David Pierce and this week we're headed out on the water the America's Cup Finals start this week and what used to be just a boat race for billionaires is now an incredibly high-tech incredibly interesting boat race for billionaires so we sent Casey Newton out into the San Francisco Bay to see what the America's Cup is becoming and how on earth billionaires spend this much money on a sailboat you we're weeks away from the America's Cup finals this year the boats have been completely redesigned in a way that has made them much much faster but also more dangerous we came down to San Francisco's Pier 80 to meet with the defending champions oracle team USA to find out what they're doing to win this race and also what they're doing to make sure that it's as safe as possible so you helped design the 2010 champion the one America's Cup when it came time to design this year's model what were the goals the girl is the ways to make an design an exciting boat something that looks like fast and like amazing machine that people that can see it said wow that's different you know and that's America's Cup so we try to get something like an eye level of sailing so we ended up with a platform which was I mean with a rigid wing it was like similar to what we did in 2010 so it looks like very different like a wing of an aircraft and and we worked a lot on for hydro foil so now the boot can fly above the water so for sure we are looking for something really different any is it the flight is what makes the boat faster than the wind and gives it the advantage over those other votes it depends on the condition so it depends on the wind condition if it's windy if it's lightweight with wrong way if it's like you go a plane or don't win so it depends a bit on the condition but a lot of resistance come from the heart itself so because we've got a big volume immerse so it creates some ID road drag so it's just like prevent you to go faster so at one stage if you are able to leave the boat from your idle foil the drag created by the hydrofoil itself it's much smaller so because you've got less resistance you can just increase your speed so that's the way it worked can you talk to me about how you try to design this boat in a way that's safe for the crew it's I mean the inherently the boat is not that safe because a multi order is can capsize you know and you can flip the boat and you can have a pitch pull a fishbowl situation these are dangerous situation so it's it's a criteria we always I mean we we always choose our design creature a very carefully regarding these maneuvers so basically we we can recreate some maneuvers on the computer and see the runge of i mean the the limits we can see the limits of the operating condition of the board so we also give tips to the sailors say okay in this condition you should have these settings these setups is probably safer when you are when you start a given given maneuver but still it's inherently is not the safe machine what kind of technology do the sailors carry on to the boat with them to help them monitor conditions in the water obviously as a every America's Cup team we have a lot of technology that is involved aboard we also have a lot of stuff for the performance and for example we are carrying obviously a few computers onboard a lot of sensor we are just to give you an idea we are logged in 3,000 variables 10 hours 10 times a second and it's a lot of that obviously why we are sailing we are not carrying about these all these information that is more for designers when we are sailing we have a lot of information and we are using a portable device we have a PDA head-up display and tablet around and basically every single person on the crew as a just information that he needs in the past the cap was different you have a navigator it was a person that was sharing the information around and it was basically just doing that so you actually write some of the software that runs on these PDAs that sailors are like yourself or carrying can you give us an idea of some of the things that you're measuring that a sailor is checking during the race honors PDA sure for example I'm a grinder and my pedestal we are the one they start controlling the board the board are the boys are going up and down so old obviously when you are in the windward side you cannot see the leeward board so all the angle and the loads that we have there it's very hard to judge by I so we have a display that you are carrying it basically tell us the information about the board about some others numbers and that is just for us we are basically the only one who boarded care about that information is what we have the tactician is it doesn't really care about the boards is more interesting win the situation and the boat speed and to win the angle so yes is on number and you can just look up that let me ask you about safety these boats are going faster than ever how do you stay safe when you're out of the boat that is a tricky question it's a it's a new Borton just like I don't all right I when I was kids I was skiing and you don't think about how dangerous key until something happened you go up down the track you enjoy and you go faster and faster every day here is the same you like the boat you go faster every day obviously when something happen is bad but is what you like and you can do it right we on the boat when it capsized I had the problem of my end called the day before so I was us because checking myself and I get the bed now okay don't you dodged that bullet but when you're out there I mean do you feel safe or you just try not to think about it I think you forget about it say when you go out there especially now that we are in a pre-race face when we go there we are not losing a much time around the baby just racing and when you're racing other cows are not seem to worry about the safety right how good are you feeling about your chances next month we have we're feeling good but obviously the team out there are very strong game we have work to do you've been on this team for 13 years now sounds like a lot of your life is just looking at data trying to maximize the performance of these boats do you feel like you're starting to hit an upper limit or as you like look out five years do you think these boats are just going to keep getting faster and better we barely scratched the surface with these both when the rule was envisaged for these boats in i guess it was 2011 we didn't even in visited boats would fly above the water was imagine they say like conventional multihulls with one hole in now they're flying it's increase the performance ten or fifteen percent those sorts of steps are not common but you could imagine that sort of paradigm again jumping another hole another whole environment so i can see big steps in the future and what makes this America's Cup in this class so exciting is that we're really just starting out with boats like this in the world of sailing and um we learn something every day fantastic so even with all of the advances that you're making technologically it is still the marriage of man and machine that is making this the fastest boat that you've sailed yet the marriage of man and machine is what wins the America's Cup always has been but the balance of who does what is changing all the time everything sounds like it's starting to lean more to the machine side a little bit yeah but you know we made the environment that much more complicated that the human beings about the only thing that can deal with all the inputs but anyway so it's a great challenge so there you have it millions of dollars and tons of energy are being pumped into making these boats incredibly fast as well as safe but talk to anyone here and they'll tell you there's no technology that can guarantee the safety of anyone on board and the reason they're willing to keep taking these risks is because everyone else on the water is gunning for them the three other teams in this race all want to be the one that knocks off the champion all oracle team USA can do in the meantime is keep training hope the weather cooperates and with any luck they just might defend their championship against overwhelming odds Casey Newton did survive his time on the Oracle vote and he's here with me now so Casey was it it was touch and go there for a while maybe it was it was a little bit scary but not as much for us we were on a chase boat but we could see what was going on on the oracle team USA boat and it's pretty amazing well even then I keep seeing clips of these boats going by you know kayakers with cameras and they're coming like this photo it's it's scary stuff out there it really is i mean the boats are enormous right this is a hundred and thirty one foot sale you have it's a boat that weighs 13,000 pounds and it is sailing faster than the wind it's an amazing to the wind is serious to the wind is serious yeah I mean this was probably the windiest America's Cup ever it's in the San Francisco Bay people knew it was going to be windy coming in but I don't know that they knew exactly how would be so okay so my big question is are these boats too dangerous like there's this big back and forth and everybody seems to have on opinion but what's what's yours are they too dangerous so I think people didn't think about how the wind conditions were going to affect the race as much as they probably should have they went into this thinking hey let's just design the fastest boat imaginable and it will be able to handle the conditions I think in these conditions these boats actually are much less safe than people hoped that they would be overall the America's Cup has a pretty good track record of safety but at the same time someone died in the preparations for this race and that was just during practice drills so the real concern is when the final start and these guys are pulling out all the stops are they going to be able to keep these incredibly huge fast boats right side up right so the solution it seems like might be you know have it in somewhere other than San Francisco which is sort of notorious for this but also having it in San Francisco makes great television it really does and the whole idea behind this year's America's Cup was let's take yachting which is the sport for the super-rich and try to make it more accessible so we'll come in lately like this much more accessible well I give UK if you flew into San Francisco you could go right up onto the shore and yeah and the boat would sort of race by you just you know get you get a decent shot of them with your camera phone and so it would be kind of a much more democratic event than it ever been before but as you've noted the wind conditions have just sort of taken everyone by surprise I mean everyone we talked to for this piece just brought up the wind as being a real curveball for them yeah ok so what's what happens next like what's happened since you did this why were they solving these problems like a god I they can't change that fact are they changing things before the race to make it so that doesn't happen again they have implemented a number of recommendations and changes that the teams need to make racing I'm sorry sailing comes to be a very litigious sport and so the billionaires who are running all these teams are suing each other to say well know that that change is going to disadvantage me and let's make this change which will you know have an advantage for me and so all of that is sort of still being negotiated so do that can the rules change up to basically the minute of the race essentially they really can uh sailing appears to have just the absolute most flexible rules of any sport I've ever seen and they pretty much seem to change like per the dictates of the billionaires who are funding 100 million dollar campaigns to win the america's cup so everyone plays very sort of fast and loose with the rules and the other big thing that's happened since we shot this piece is that there's been a cheating scandal so Oracle has been accused of putting weights on their boats possibly to sort of keep them more grounded in the water and they've gone over the weight limit for their class of boat this is all sort of still being sorted out Oracle insists we didn't cheat but in the meantime it has been another black eye for a race that many people are starting to view asked as something of a fiasco so what you just described something that it sounds like would make the boat that and safer and it's cheating to do that right that was happening here that's right well you know I mean all of the all of the rules of saline are like completely arbitrary but they do try to come up with a weight limit for the boat right so if you bring some illegal weights on if you think it's going to give you some sort of performance advantage like it seems like it's probably not right and they do the ideas just it'll handle better yeah I just make everybody else put the weights in the book right I just solve your problem welcome yeah I mean it sounds like NASA almost what do you have the it's 11 people on the boat yeah and then there's this whole control room behind them keeping everything going well so the control room is in a different boat okay so another sugar also out on the on the bay yeah okay yeah and they're actually they're not allowed to communicate during the races so that's a one rule that is that sort of when you're on the boat you have to kind of do it by yourself but they do all have pda's that are like sort of on their arms that have custom written software some of the sailors write their own software we're pretty amazing and they dirty visual that day that's gets very very good julion I think it's hard to become a billionaire without being dirty once you inherit the well yeah so so what do you think if you're you know looking forward for the America's Cup and the team's building these boats like what do you see changing what would you prescribe well we're Larry Ellison what are you doing that if I'm Larry Ellison I'm gonna have a very expensive dinner somewhere out and then I'm going to go back to my lab and see how we can make these boats faster but I think that you're going to see the sailing community come under increasing pressure to truly make these boats safer so they wouldn't let you on one now would you get on what if you could oh absolutely yeah yeah I mean like the thing is you know I keep saying this but the boats fly okay okay not really like they're still what kind of literally literally fly right so there's like a dagger board and it's in the water and like you know the this like 7,000 pounds of force lifts them and then they move faster than the wind because they've reduced the drag so much I want to be on the boat when it happens it's not yeah maybe not racing know maybe racing I don't know I don't wanna be anywhere near the book here's what I don't want to be like actually like at the wheel like I don't want to be the captain of this ship but if they could just sort of like duct tape me around the past so I could like feel that lift to be great yeah yeah just put me on a nice harness we good okay well so you talked to Julian Guthrie who wrote who literally wrote the book on the America's Cup she's sort of a historian and has followed the crew especially Larry Alice and the Oracle crew and so you talked to her about all this stuff and more so let's have a look at that Julian a lot of the money for America's Cup has come from Larry Ellison founder CEO of Oracle why is Larry Ellison so interested in sailing he you know that's a great question sailing for him is where he gets a break from being Larry Ellison which is a really unexpected thing so he gets to go out on these boats he gets to be a member of the team and he's expected to perform just like anybody else on the boat and he can have Russell Coutts you know as his technician screaming at him you know what the did you forget how to sail you know who else is going to talk to Larry Ellison like that so I think that he's measured against how well he does on the boat so having said that you know he loves the water he loves the sea he's loved sailing since or the idea of sailing since he was a kid he was a very accomplished sailor starting at around 1995 through year 2000 he got as far as he could along with the sailing and the maxi yachts at that point and the next level was the America's Cup and Larry Ellison is all about what you know how do you go up to the next weight class and it had gone from maxi yacht sailing to the America's Cup the mayor America's Cup is the pinnacle so he couldn't go any you know that's the heavyweight championship of the world and it seems like now that he's reached that pinnacle he's trying to take it to the next level yet again right the boats this time around are much faster maybe more dangerous you talk at all about what's different between this year's race and the 2010 championship well one thing that's different everybody talks about these boats the ac72s being crazy fast which they are I think team new zealand logged 52 miles an hour last week you know which is faster than the speed limit on the Golden Gate Bridge and so they are flying but the look that really set this all in motion is us a 17 which is in the parking lot here which you should go and see and the wing sale of us a 17 was 230 feet tall too tall and standing up to fit under the Golden Gate Bridge so that was the trimaran what Larry Ellison called his black pterodactyl that won the America's Cup for oracle racing in 2010 and that set the precedent for technological innovation but these boats are flying literally so you have this wing on top of the boat the hard sale and you have these wings under the boat that are getting the boat out of the water and therefore doing what's ailing you know tries to do when I said its best and that is reduced drag so you're having these crazy fast boats I mean they're really phenomenal to look at the instability is coming from the speed from the foiling and from San Francisco Bay because of how extreme sailing is on San Francisco Bay so without resorting to hyperbole is this possibly going to be the most dangerous america's cup of all time oh definitely but but i think it's important to keep perspective this is 162 year old regatta and there have been two fatalities you know san francisco being a pedestrian is more dangerous you know a teen fatalities every year crossing the street in san francisco so you have to have some perspective you know you'll talk with Jimmy Spithill you talk with some of these sailors their adrenaline junkie junkies and they want it to be safe but they want to get to the finish line the fastest I mean that's the objective NBC has a deal to show this year's NBC or this year's America's Cup how is television getting involved change the race is there sort of a desire among television executives to have a race that sure is fast but it's maybe going to have a little bit more calamity than the average regatta well you know NBC it's my understanding didn't become really interested in the americas cup until russell coutts pitch pulled the ac45 back it was more than a year ago it's about a year and a half ago so suddenly you know you have these gorgeous boats you have this amazing amphitheater of the San Francisco Bay and you have these boats pitch bowling which is like doing a cartwheel if you're a boat and suddenly they thought wow the executives the media folks thought this is really exciting this is you know Formula One racing on the water so it was this yes it's getting faster it's getting more dangerous and that attracted the major networks I understand now for the first time they have PDAs they have wearables you know you mentioned earlier that technology has always been a big part of the America's Cup what role is it playing in this year's race Oh every facet of it I mean it's really you know it's it's the the technological innovation in the grade of carbon fiber you know it's what is the best carbon fiber you can get for the boats the the Kevlar the Kleiss are the aeronautical skin that goes around the sales it's it is how these races are going to be unpaired which is totally changing because of the technology it is how viewers people who know nothing about sailing are going to be able to understand the races because of the lines they're laying out through this through this totally new technology that they're laying out on the water so they're gonna understand which boat is ahead and they're going to understand what the boundaries are what the objectives are so that is entirely new you know the guys are miked the guys are theirs there are hundreds of sensors on board these boats the the the weather data that they're getting the ability to track the other boats performance and compare it to their own you know it's all technology-based it's it's definitely cutting-edge I think it's the most cutting-edge technology used in any sport the like what people liken it to is Formula One racing does that does that analogy holed up in your mind is this formula 1 racing on the water I think it's a lot more complex you know I think for one building these boats is more complex you think about they it's more complex than building at you know an airplane even because they're having to build these you know space-age flying machines for the water and for the air you've got the engine of the boat which is the sale in the air and you've got the other parts so the engineering of these votes is super complex more complex than cars more complex than than airplanes you know the wing sail that they built for us a 17 the winning boat in 2010 230 feet tall too tall when too tall when standing up to fit under the Golden Gate Bridge you know is the largest wing cell ever built wing ever built for error for see so as you size up the competition this year can anybody catch Oracle how competitive is it I think it's very competitive you know people have talked about how there are fewer teams this year and complained or lamented over there being fewer teams but one thing that I heard Jimmy Spithill say which made a lot of senses yeah in the past there have been more teams but they weren't all real contenders I think the Kiwis are the team to beat you know I wouldn't although I think that you know team Oracle Team USA is unbelievable you know and and Jimmy and Ben Ainslie and their whole crew it's a pretty cool thing you know it's a dream realized whether you like you know whether your fan of the America's Cup or not there are a lot of Dreams being realized with this event that's our show thanks to Casey Newton for being here and thanks to Julian Guthrie and the whole Oracle Team USA team as well the America's Cup final starts September 7th on NBC and it's going to be awesome but probably also kind of terrifying anyway we'll be back next week and we'll see you that you