Two days, two headaches for Luna Rossa in Cagliari

It’s not every day you see an America’s Cup team fix its boat with tape and carry on sailing. But that’s what Luna Rossa did in Cagliari this week, after a broken sensor pole punched a hole in the side of its AC75.

The damage, logged by the AC Recon team, came on Tuesday, the team’s first day back after a four-week break, and it set the tone for a stop-start return. A day later, an unexplained problem around the rudder sent the boat home early.

Cagliari hardly rolled out the welcome mat. Tuesday’s breeze took most of the day to arrive and was never reliable when it did. The water was choppy enough to give the chase boats a hard time. Peter Burling and his Italian co-helms – Marco Gradoni, later swapped for Ruggero Tita – started cautiously, the AC75 a little lopsided on the downwind runs, with Gigi Ugolini, Umberto Molineris and Vittorio Bissaro sharing the trimming and Maria Giubilei on board in the fifth seat.

The AC75 grew sharper as the afternoon wore on. A thunderstorm rolling through briefly halted proceedings, but once it moved on the crew turned to start practice, looping through the box and tacking along the line.

Late in the day, with a new jib being put through its paces, the boat buried into a wave. The impact snapped the pole carrying the Lidar sensor, and the loose pole speared into the starboard hull.

You might have expected them to head for the dock. Instead, the technicians had a look inside, covered the hole with tape, and the crew went back out for a few more gybes. By the end of the day the boat had logged 106 minutes on the foils and close to 50 manoeuvres.

Wednesday’s flatter water suited Luna Rossa much better, and the boat looked sharper from the start. The morning was busy: back-to-back tacks, tight loops and hard bear-aways. Before the next session, the crew checked the mainsail lock at the top of the mast.

Then came a reminder of how fine the margins are on these machines. The AC75 dropped off its foils shortly into the second session, seemingly with the rudder losing grip. After a pause to change personnel and fit fresh batteries, it ground to a halt not long into the third session.

A diver went in to look at the rudder from underneath while crew and engineers searched the boat from above. Recon couldn’t see enough to work out the cause. One possibility is a camera newly built into the hull just ahead of the rudder; another is the bearing that holds the rudder in place. The boat was towed in, and no damage was obvious when it was lifted out.

What both days do show is a team deep in development mode. Recon noted a reworked rudder, a new mainsail paired with a rotation of brand-new jibs in different sizes, and cameras dotted around the boat – on the foils, up the rig and now in the hull.

On the port foil, a pair of extra GoPros was trained on new paint markings across the wing, possibly to study how water flows over it. Another sensor sat in the deck, apparently to record airflow around the mainsail. The sixth seat on board was a revolving door for engineers, with a different one aboard for each spell on Tuesday. All of that suggests an intensive programme of data-gathering.

When things were running smoothly, the manoeuvres were consistent too. Recon clocked the boat at around six seconds to switch from one foil to the other through a tack, on both days.

With Naples 2027 still some way off, a taped-up hull and a rudder mystery hardly amount to a crisis. But they’re a reminder that even the best-resourced campaigns still have plenty to iron out.