Team Oracle Penalized For America's Cup Rules Violations

whoever57 writes "On Saturday, Oracle Team USA and Team New Zealand will begin racing for the America's Cup in the amazing AC72 boats. However, the Oracle team starts with a significant handicap. It was recently discovered that members of Oracle Team USA made illegal changes to the boats used in the America's Cup Series (which is sailed in the smaller AC45 boats). After a hearing on Friday, the International Jury has decided on the penalty: Team Oracle will have to pay a fine and sail without some team members. More significantly, they lose two points before starting the America's Cup races against Team New Zealand. A tiny amount of weight had been added to the kingpost, in violation of the measurement rules for the class. This was reported to the measurement committee some weeks ago after its discovery by boatbuilders working for America's Cup Regatta Management (ACRM), not members of Oracle Team USA."

Comments

Wow

[ArchieBunker]

I'm sure all six of the fans who watch this race are shocked.

Re:Wow

[BLKMGK]

Actually i watched some of the races in the run up to the cup and found it pretty interesting. The boats are sailing at as high as 50MPH with hulls nearly fully out of the water. There's tons of telemetry and the announcers are doing a decent job of explaining what's going on - it's actually fun to watch and you can see it takes a great deal of skill. Scoff if you want but I for one found it interesting, adding all of this telemetry really does add to it I think. It helps too that the boats are so damned advanced and fast!

Re:Wow

[MightyYar]

The irony is that a NASCAR team has a lot more in common with an Americas Cup team than with anything poor, trashy, or stupid.

Re:Wow

[deathguppie]

The America's cup is watched by millions. Team costs per syndicate are in the hundreds of millions making Indie racing or formula 1 a joke in comparison. What's more it is the least regulated form of racing (current situation not incumbering) of all the professional racing sports. 30 years ago they were racing mono-hull sailboats pounding through small waves. Now they are racing multihulls that litterally lift off the water on wings going faster than the traffic on the golden gate bridge and almost leaving the speed boats that trail them in the dust.
From my personal experience sailing a boat over 25knts the splashes start to feel like pebbles and then rocks hitting you.. the intensity of having a vehicle of that size moving at that speed is akin to taking Caterpillar 797 through a downhill from Pikes peak. It's amazing and a great sport at any level.

Re:Wow

[Solandri]

While it's regarded as a rich man's sport, the race has been a major driving force behind research into the use and manufacture of carbon fiber composite structures, and methods for determining computational solutions for the Navier-Stokes equation (which is still unsolved, and is not even known if there is/isn't an algorithmic solution). The race creates an incentive for the super-rich to become early adopters of these technologies. Without the race they'd probably piss their money away on gold toilet seats or who could make the biggest megayacht. At least this way they're spending money on advancing the state of the art for technologies which will eventually benefit you and me.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Not sure where you get your information about funding for Formula 1 from, but its bollocks, whilst the teams do not publish specific breakdowns at line item level, they spend a LOT of money every single year.

Even six years ago the teams were spending a fortune each year, See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formula_One#Revenue_and_profits for some sort of general idea,

The current estimate of Red Bull racing is they are spending in excess of $295M/year every year.

http://www.hindustantimes.com/motor-sports/topstories/The-bonkers-business-logic-of-Formula-1-teams/SP-Article1-968466.aspx

A simple Google search shows more details.

So in conclusion, the Americas cup is run every three years and costs around $100M to mount a challenge, a top F1 team spends approx $300M per year every year so spends $900M in the same timescale.

Simply put F1 costs around 9x per year than the Americas Cup. Yep you were talking bollocks.

Re:Wow

[argStyopa]

America's cup is watched by millions....barely.
http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2013/08/21/tiny-audience-for-americas-cup-tv.html

The semifinals are averaging 50-80,000 viewers.
The races just off San Francisco with the most effete/trendy/hipster crowd imaginable, averaged 800-900,000.

This is somewhere around the ratings received by NBC's "Last Call" at midnight.

This is a marginal sport irrelevant to 99.9999% of the population, and in which the only participants are giant conglomerates or kajillionaires. Granted, formula one racing, etc are likewise only for the big-money teams, but pretty much everyone drives. Sailing as a regular activity is already a marginal sport performed only by the tiniest rind of enthusiasts, that 'pro sailing' is like the margin of the margin of the margin. I don't doubt that it takes tremendous ability, intelligence, and teamwork. It's just that the bulk of us can neither see it nor appreciate it if we could.

Re:Wow

[Russ1642]

Don't bring facts into this discussion.

Explanation...

[wbr1]

A tiny amount of weight had been added to the kingpost, in violation of the measurement rules for the class.

So that is where Larry Ellison hid the pennies he hears from ask.com toolbar spam on the Java installer.

Re:Explanation...

[SeaFox]

Can someone please explain why people say there's a toolbar in the Java installer? I have always gotten the JRE/JDK from http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/index.html and have never encountered such a thing. Am I the only one who knows these even exist?

Most people just get it from the home page, and that's a different installer.
Remember, a large number of people who get Java only do so because Pogo tells them to. For those people this is "surfing the internet". And they're going to click the first search result, which is that same installer. Yeah, your page is the third result, but they will ask "Is 'Java SE' the same as 'Java'?" and they'll skip it.

When the consumer version automatically notifies you of an update, the updater has the same type of installer (with the tag-along software), so you have to uncheck the option every time you update Java now.

Sometimes I wonder if people have making life more difficult for themselves just to give them something to rant about.

More difficult like digging through a tech-net website looking for a installation program, and coming to this page (which would intimidate any non-techy person)?

No worries...

[JohnA]

Oracle is planning to sue the America's Cup team for violating their patents on "Boat API v1.0"... that'll teach them to build a boat using standard terms like hull, sail, and rudder!

"miniscule"

[girlintraining]

Okay, from what I'm reading here, this sounds like a gross over-reaction and a lot of rich old people taking shit way, way, way too seriously -- over an apparent lead weight added to some doo-hicky mc-shippy thing which if I spent the next several hours orgasming over the idea of captaining an overly-expensive boat with no practical application other than being a giant penis floating through the waves, I might understand the function of.

Such as it is though, I'm a computer geek, and the only thing I understand is performance. And everything I've read is that the change was tiny, and would probably have less effect on the performance of the ship than whether one of the teammates ate at McDonald's and forgot to crap after. No, I'm perfectly serious -- it seems that all this hub-a-bub amounts to someone having nailed a few ounces of metal to some part of the ship and it would have next to no impact on the ship's performance. So from an engineering and sport performance perspective... it's a tempest in a teapot.

So why the angry rich people hating on Oracle? As far as I can tell, They're angry and running about calling it "cheating" over what appears to be a simple case of not understanding the horribly dense and overly-complicated rules, in a new ship class that just debuted this year.

It's like NASCAR finding out that someone used windex to clean the windshield instead of the pre-approved isopropyl alcohol mix and deciding it was cheating, that NASCAR's reputation was ruined, and the only way to fix it would be to put the driver and the entire pit team out for a good public flogging while the guy with the jet pack flies over head carrying an American flag hung upside down and a long banner saying "You assholes! You killed it for everyone."

Fucking rich people. If it were me, I'd say screw it, build a submarine, and go out there and play Jaws with their rich-ass ships, sinking all of them one by one while Ride of the Valkyries played from giant water-proof speakers... because if there's one thing I hate more than people taking themselves too seriously, it's taking themselves too seriously and being rich pompous bastards while doing it. -_-

Oracle... you heard it here first: Build a U-boat and go sink those rich asshats.

Re:"miniscule"

[whoever57]

it seems that all this hub-a-bub amounts to someone having nailed a few ounces of metal to some part of the ship and it would have next to no impact on the ship's performance. So from an engineering and sport performance perspective... it's a tempest in a teapot.

That is the most puzzling part of this: why? any advantage would be far too small to make any difference to the outcome of a race.

So why the angry rich people hating on Oracle? As far as I can tell, They're angry and running about calling it "cheating" over what appears to be a simple case of not understanding the horribly dense and overly-complicated rules, in a new ship class that just debuted this year.

Last year, actually. It was an AC45 that was modified. These boats have been racing for over a year and are effectively a one-design class. This wasn't an accidental rule violation. This was weight added deliberately:

The suspect forward kingpost appeared to have been filled with a resin/ballast slurry of some type. and weighed 3.744 kg.

And:

Oracle... you heard it here first: Build a U-boat and go sink those rich asshats.

In this competition, Oracle are the richest of the rich asshats.

Re:"miniscule"

[viperidaenz]

It's not really an international race though. Both Team New Zealand and Team Larry are skippered by Kiwis.

It's more like Auckland vs Wellington.

Re:"miniscule"

[adolf]

Thank you for the linked citation. Your posting is exemplary in ways that many others fail.

I note one obvious problem with your citation: Therein, it is proclaimed that there are fans of Oracle.

Who are these "fans"? Please elaborate.

Re:"miniscule"

[deathguppie]

The "king post" is what keeps the bow sprit from moving aft when pressure from the sail is added to it. The only reason for adding weight to it in this situation is if the bow happened to be rising to quickly. The rules imply that any wing shape added to the keel/centerboard must stay in the same angle/plane for the duration of the race. Designers skipped this rule by creating a moveable lifting plane on the bow of the boat. Tilting this plane lifts the boat up off of the water. However, this is a balancing act. It takes a lot of skill and design compitence to create and run one of these rigs. The NZ team was the first to figure out the cheat, and everyone else has been playing catch up. Team Oracles boat designed by Paul Burke, was not designed with the lifting planes originally intended. In this case some of the team members took it upon themselves to level the feild by adding weight to keep the bows from popping up to quickly and losing control of when they would and would not plane on the hydrofoils. It is a bit picky, but those people involved knew well what they were doing and went through lengths to cover it up. If they had just put a hunk of lead up there, judges would probably just have said "hey you can't do that".. but instead it was found buried purposely put there. That is pretty much willfull defiance of the rules. I'm an american shipwright from the northwest where these boats are built, so I'm definately on the US side.. but I see the significance of the decision, both ways.

Re:"miniscule"

[sjames]

Even among rich asshats Oracle and Ellison stand out as rich asshats.,/p

How do I?

[Fnord666]

How do I moderate an article as off topic?

Re:How do I?

[cold fjord]

Two choices. Get it while it is in the submission queue and vote it down, or don't post in it if it becomes a story on the front page.

Re:How do I?

[bluefoxlucid]

Have you ever actually analyzed the engineering requirements for a good boat? Oh sure, rednecks love those power boats with a V10 Dodge Viper engine driving some screws by brute force in the most inefficient way possible; but have you ever actually looked at boats?

Let's put it this way: The Chinese Junk is the best boat ever made. It's harder to sail than a modern sail boat, but functionally superior when handled properly. It was the inspiration for sealed partitions--thousands of years ago you could sink a boat by holing it, and then the Europeans found out that the Chinese put a bunch of rooms in the boat and made it possible to seal them so you'd only take on so much water. They started storing rum in some of the partitions. The rigging on the sails allows for better agility and faster sailing in all winds--including directly into the wind.

Modern boats have surpassed the junk in some respects and trailed it in others. They're easier to sail and faster in some conditions; they're designed to hold level and sail more efficiently than old models, but these adaptations can go back to the junk easily (the main difference in a Junk vs a modern boat is its sail rigging); they're made of better materials that decrease drag and improve balance and handling, allowing for straighter and faster sailing and less risk of capsizing; and so on.

All in all, in thousands of years of engineering, we've managed to make some improvements and some trade-offs... very little in the way of actual advancement. Not only is it hard to engineer a ship that can sail and sail quickly, but it's hard to pilot one. It's hard to maintain one. You have to deal with wind going the wrong way and then you have to manipulate the sails to harness power from the wind and directly turn that into driving force--you're not turning a turbine, you're catching the wind going east and making the boat go northwest. It's not even as simple as cutting in and then turning and dropping out; the goal is to keep as much wind in your sails as possible--to pull in the full of the wind 100% of the time while sailing directly in the opposite direction from where the wind is trying to push you. Not very easy.

It's a huge, huge engineering problem. It's complex and these are fairly amazing machines. But by all means, go ahead and go out there with a few two-by-fours and some wax and a tarp and build yourself a top-tier sailboat, and see how quick you can cut across the harbor. Make sure the coast guard's there too; your mommy might need to come pick you up when your little boat sinks.

Re:The only thing cool about this article...

[whoever57]

Google "foiling moth video" and prepare to have your mind blown with what can be done with a lot less money!

Re:The only thing cool about this article...

[erikkemperman]

Thanks for sharing, that's pretty awesome

Full jury decision

[Berre]

The full jury decision (including details of the modification) can be found here: http://noticeboard.americascup.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/JN117.pdf