A full testing program is a very important phase prior to going on the water
because it will provide full confidence to the designers and to the builders,
and to the sailors In order to be able to push 100% from day one.
After the first generation of the one design, we have gone to a full review.
We have changed the way we are building it and we have changed the way we analyze it,
in order for the designers and the builders to make sure that we successfully accomplish this milestone.
These AC75's are absolutely extremes machines,
they develop and they deploy a huge amount of load.
If you imagine a normal car weighs around a 1,000 kilograms,
here we are testing this foil arm with the equivalent of 20 cars.
So we have 20,000 kilograms applied to the connection of this arm, and this arm is attached
inside a boat in a space that is just 600 millimetres or 0.6 of a metre.
In 0.6 of a meter, this arm needs to react and withstand the equivalent load of 20 cars.
This kind of boat has never been done ever before.
It's the first time we introduced this new kind of architecture so we want to make sure it works.
It's not very often that you that you get the opportunity to test something to this level.
Have this amount of information available,
but there is also the uncertainty of, your putting something into a test rig that's never been tested before,
and you never know what can go wrong
It has to be light in order to take off and foil early enough in light winds,
so we can't afford to produce some elements that are absolutely
bulletproof because they will be too heavy and will not allow us to foil.
It's a very big deal that this goes right,
because it means the teams can move forward in confidence.
We can go sailing, we can go have regattas and we can move on.
This test is the last test, one-off, one-way, no way back.
Breaking this arm is going beyond the usual engineering screening that we usually do on components.
So we are in a zone where we will be able to understand
the behaviour of the structures over its service limits, over its extreme limit, up to the very end.
When we give the "go" and push the button,
this cylinder of 35 tons will start to pull and there is no way back.
We started to have some micro-cracking happening on the way up,
but way over the 2.1 times that was the expected minimum breaking.
We still need to go through the surface fracture but it looks like typical bending compression tension.
We are good to go. We have an arm.
We are looking forward to seeing the AC75 on the water now.