Team Australia finish Te Rehutai rebuild and set February target for Naples

The 2021 Cup-winning AC75 has a new bow, a cut-down stern and fresh paint. Next come load testing, systems fit-out and a Christmas shipping deadline, while Tom Slingsby’s co-helm is still being chosen in the simulator.

Team Australia have finished the composite rebuild and paint job on Te Rehutai, the AC75 Emirates Team New Zealand used to win the 2021 America’s Cup. They now have roughly two months to get it on a ship to Naples. Glenn Ashby, the team’s head of performance and design, told the America’s Cup’s in-house media team last week that the boat must be ready to ship by Christmas, with arrival in Italy hoped for in February.

“Now we are basically doing structural testing next week, so rolling the boat upside down onto a jig, and then jacking the boat right up to full load, just to make sure that all the new mods are all good,” Ashby said. “It should be fine, but just to double check, and I think the Team New Zealand guys are really keen to do that.”

After the load test comes a week of installing electronics and hydraulics. Only then can the hull, its Southern Spars rig and the rest of the team’s kit head to sea. Ashby, fresh from a week alongside the boat in Auckland, is keeping the new livery under wraps for now.

It has been a big week for Ashby off the water too. On 16 October he was inducted into the America’s Cup Hall of Fame, joining the ceremony at the New York Yacht Club by video link after a family matter kept him in Australia.

The conversion has been carried out at Emirates Team New Zealand’s Auckland base, and the defenders’ role goes well beyond renting out floor space. That is an unusual position for a challenger, and Ashby was clear about how much depends on it: “the ability to be able to make it to the start line in Naples is largely due to Team New Zealand being able to sell us a design package and then help execute the modifications on ‘Te Rehutai’ into the class legal 75 hull.”

The AC38 rules give teams converting a 2021-generation hull more room to manoeuvre than those reusing a 2024 boat: only 87.5 per cent of the original structure has to be retained. That leaves space to strip out what the older boats carried for running backstays, bowsprits and bobstays. Team Australia have used that allowance at both ends of the boat.

“Basically what we’ve done is effectively cut the back corners of the boat off and got rid of all the runner structure that was in the back of the boat,” Ashby said. “Aerodynamically, the boats are better with the tucked in transoms and lower weight, so it was a bit of a win-win.”

Up front, the bobstay fittings and the bowsprit structure the new rule no longer calls for have also come out. “We managed to pull enough weight out to get it down to meet the rule, which was a big job,” Ashby said.

The bow is new too. McConaghy Boats laminated it at its yard in Gosford, on the New South Wales Central Coast, and it was bonded onto the hull in Auckland about two months ago. That satisfies the constructed-in-country rule, which for boats launched before 19 October 2024 requires at least 2.7 metres of forward hull exterior to be laminated in the competitor’s home country.

Tom Slingsby will skipper and helm. The seat beside him has not been filled, even though the team’s official profile lists Jason Waterhouse as co-helm. “We’re actually doing full rotation through a lot of the guys at the moment, so we haven’t actually locked any of those final positions in as yet, as we’re doing a lot of testing on the simulator,” Ashby said. He expects an announcement within about a month.

Ashby named four sailors in that rotation – Waterhouse, Tom Needham, Kinley Fowler and Sam Newton – and singled out the first two as going well. Waterhouse is the Rio 2016 Nacra 17 silver medallist; Needham skippered Yandoo to the 2025 JJ Giltinan Trophy, the 18ft Skiff’s de facto world title. Ashby added: “Tash Bryant, she’s actually giving the boys a real run for their money as far as the capabilities going.” Bryant co-helmed Britain's Athena Pathway to second place in the 2024 Women’s America’s Cup. The AC38 race crew is five sailors, with batteries replacing the cyclors, and must include at least one woman.

The Australians’ challenge, on behalf of the Royal Prince Edward Yacht Club, was accepted only in May as the sixth challenger. La Roche-Posay Racing Team became the first of the seven teams to sail an AC75 on the Bay of Naples on Monday 19 October and plan to train through the Mediterranean winter. If Team Australia’s schedule holds, they will have about three months on the water before the Louis Vuitton Cup starts on Saturday 22 May 2027. Not a long runway, but enough to make Naples – which, by Ashby’s own account, was never a given.