Saild Sailing Blog

Now that we’re only a few breaths away from the 33rd Americas Cup we thought that having looked at the skippers we should now get out the tape measures and look at the stats of the two most advanced sailing yachts ever built.

One thing we don’t know are 100% exact numbers and details as each team has been pretty secretive about speeds, performance and other details. A certain amount however is known and the rest can be reasonably guessed.

We’ve put together what we’ve found out about the two boats here, if you think that you know more then let us know in the comments and we’ll keep ourselves up-to-date. The biggest differences we’ve seen so far is the interchangeable masts and wing from BMW Oracle, we’ll soon see whether it’s an advantage.

Overall both boats are big, expensive and very very fast, sailing between 2-2.5 times faster than the wind speed that propels them there are some videos here.

Update 1: BMW Oracle – USA 17 has been reported by Voiles et Voiliers a French publication as having achieved 29kts in 6kts of wind i.e 4.8x the actual wind speed

Update 2: Thanks to help from the guys on the SailingAnarchy forum I’ve been able to update the chart with both new data on USA 17 & Alinghi 5 as well as corrected data. Also the previous chart showed the AC90 class which didn’t race in the 32nd America’s Cup, the revision below shows the ACCv5 which did. Sorry about that

BMW Oracle USA 17 vs Alinghi 5 vs ACCv5 Comparison v2