America's Cup

I was hired by BMW Oracle Racing to work on the design of the team’s yachts for the 2003 America’s Cup in Auckland NZ. In that campaign I had the pleasure to work under the direction of Russell Bowler of Farr Yacht Design. My responsibilities in that campaign were to participate in the conceptual design of the structures as well as the detail engineering, design and production support. This was my introduction to prepreg construction materials and methods. It was also my introduction to yacht design in a large team environment.

I was again hired on by BMOR for the 2007 America’s Cup effort in Valencia Spain. During this campaign I was in charge of the structural design of the hulls and appendages as well as the production support for the builder. BMW provided three top level engineers (Thomas Hahn, Christoph Erbelding, and Ingo Raasch) to do structural research and engineering for the team from our offices in Seattle. This was a great opportunity to learn about state of the art engineering tools, as well as to write some of our own design tools for handling large and complex composite structural design models. It was during this time that Eric Jolley joined the team to do geometry lofting and detail design work.

I was again hired by BMOR to lead the structural design team for the 33rd America’s Cup. However this Cup has been fought more in the courts than on the water; when we ended up with a Deed of Gift multihull to design, I took on a supporting role in the structural design - reviewing the design work of the venerable French engineering firm HDS, and having responsibility for engineering many of the details of the yacht, such as the daggerboard, rudders and various hardware and winch system supports. In addition, Eric Jolley provided most of the production support for the building of the boat (molds, jigs, and patterns). It was very interesting to learn about the engineering of these giant beasts and it was a great challenge to build a boat of that magnitude in eight months.

-Paul

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