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!

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.

"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"

[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.

How do I?

[Fnord666]

How do I moderate an article as off topic?