Everybody here has some degree of passion.
They all want to succeed at this.
They all want to win the America’s Cup.
Everybody’s working as hard as they possibly can to achieve that goal.
I always loved sailing and I always wanted to be involved in this, even though most of
my professors were telling me, that will never happen.
I just stayed true to it, and here I am.
America's Cup is the most prestigious yacht race in the world.
And there are two Michigan Engineers on team USA.
Who are racing to design, build and test the winning boat.
Bryan Baker is an engineer for Oracle Team USA.
He write software to predict how design changes will affect the speed of the boat.
Baker graduated from Michigan Engineering with his B.S.E. in 2003.
What it boils down to is speed.
Then engine in our project here is the wing.
So the wind is basically pushing that forward and creating thrust.
And the thing that holds that back is the drag which is coming from the hull.
The thing that’s different about this boat is the fact that it completely is foiling
on dynamic pressure, so you need to be going quick for it to work.
For the America's Cup, each team must build a yacht within strict design constraints.
But a number of speed-producing parts are left open for modification.
This has challenged every team to train a crew of elite sailors.
But more importantly, use engineering to design a competitive advantage.
If you take the top sailors in the world and put them all in the same boat, you’re going
to get some really close racing.
But for us, for the design, you’re really just looking for those small things that are
going to make a really big difference.
We conceive, design, engineer, build and try things in very short time cycles.
Scott Ferguson is the design coordinator for Oracle Team USA.
He oversees the design of the entire boat.
Ferguson graduated from Michigan Engineering with his B.S.E. in 1985.
Sometimes we do things really quick and dirty just to get an answer, and it’s a great
process actually because you learn more things more quickly by doing them that way.
And we have a good enough infrastructure here where the builders are quick to respond to
changes to turn around and get something built that we can try.
In all of the things that we’ve been testing, we have some idea of what it is we’re looking
for, something to achieve out of the design that we have.
And quite often or not we’ll go sailing with some change to the boat that actually
doesn’t work.
And we try to then figure out what made that actually happen, whether it’s the geometry
or the stiffness.
So we’ve broken a lot of stuff, to push the limit.
And that’s what it’s all about.
We’re actually thinning things and trying to make them as light and as strong as we possibly can.
Oracle Team USA is the defending champion of the America's Cup.
They will fight to retain the title for the United States.
Recent innovations in yacht design promise to make this the fastest cup ever.
It’s always been about technology.
Even at the start of the America’s Cup, at that time the materials were wood and cloth.
There wasn’t carbon fiber.
But they pushed those materials as hard as they possibly could, and all throughout the
life of the Cup, that’s exactly what the designs have been.
It’s the combination of the technology and the sailing that I think makes this particular
event, the America’s Cup, unique, and that’s why I love it.
This is definitely the way that the future of sailing will go.