AC Recon: Luna Rossa's AC75 hits 40 knots on day one

The America's Cup has never been a sport for early finishers, and on Wednesday Luna Rossa proved that point once again. The Italians waited until the Cagliari sun was sliding towards the sea before lifting their AC75 off the water for the first time this 38th America's Cup cycle, with the boat foiling for real at around 7pm.

Peter Burling and Ruggero Tita split the helming, and neither was in any rush. The AC75 is a very different beast to the one-design AC40 the fleet was racing a few weeks ago in Cagliari, and it showed: gybes were gingerly done, often with two boards down for stability, and the session kept halting as technicians hopped aboard to check everything was talking to everything else.

The mast went up mid-afternoon – a minor snag while stepping it nudged the timeline back – before the boat was craned in and the crew rattled through the rest. Cameras were bolted to the foils and wings, recording gear and antennas studded the rig, and LiDAR poles went up once they cleared the harbour, with the sail designers shadowing the new mainsail from the chase boats. A broken mainsheet part then had someone darting back to base for a spare.

Once the offshore Maestrale settled in at 14–16 knots, the AC75 showed it has pace, clocking an estimated 40–42 knots on its first proper downwind run. Holding it steady was the trickier part. On the early upwind legs the boat looked nervy in pitch and ride height, the windward foil digging in hard, and it stayed jumpy once it met the chop further offshore. After one slow-but-steady gybe and 14 minutes in the air, the team parked up for a long rummage below decks before calling it a night around 8pm. That leaves them with 46 of their allotted 47 testing days for the year.

Luna Rossa boss Max Sirena was a happy man. "It is always a pleasure, no?" he said. "Every time when we splash this boat for the first time, it's blowing over 20 knots for day one, but it's good!" He reckoned they'd ticked off everything on the day's list, with the splash, as ever, stirring real emotion within the team.

Looking further out, Sirena is bracing for a tight fight: "It's going to be the third cycle of this type of boat," he said, "so… the gap between boats is getting closer and closer," before predicting some proper match-racing fireworks once the Cup reaches Naples.

Down in Auckland, the Defenders were putting in a proper shift. Emirates Team New Zealand rolled Taihoro out early and wrung seven sessions out of a cold, patchy southerly that crept from barely 4 knots up to a more workable 12–14. They drilled starts, stalled the main on purpose to drop off the foils, threw in ever-sharper bear-aways and round-ups, and kept the drone overhead all day.

The face that caught the eye, though, was Blair Tuke, back on board having sat out the AC40 preliminary regatta in Cagliari – where the official word was he'd be taking on a more managerial role. Instead, here he was swapping between the fifth and sixth crew slots with Jo Aleh, sometimes while the boat was still flying. Whatever the job title, he looks very much hands-on.

And the next one isn't far off. We’re told the French challenger, La Roche-Posay Racing Team, are set to launch their own AC75 in under a fortnight, with 24 June the date to watch. That’ll make them the third of the seven teams in AC38 to hit the water. With ground broken on the team bases at Bagnoli, it's all go in the America's Cup world.