Starting from scratch – Tudor Team Alinghi’s AC38 reset

After a disastrous – by their own high standards – campaign in the 37th America’s Cup, Switzerland’s Tudor Team Alinghi appear to have thrown out the playbook and started almost again effectively from scratch for AC38.

Yesterday, at an uncharacteristically low-key press day at the Marina Vela - Azulona Marinas in Barcelona, the team revealed a sailing squad that included just one member of the crew that raced the Swiss AC75 in the last Cup cycle.

That means no return for the Swiss core AC37 crew of Arnaud Psarofaghis, Maxime Bachelin, Bryan Mettraux, Nicolas Charbonnier, Lucien Cujean, and Yves Detrey – with only trimmer Nicolas Rolaz surviving to be invited back for his second campaign.

After that Swiss-centric line-up was comprehensively outclassed by the more experienced teams during the racing, in an AC37 campaign that was hamstrung by two inexplicable mast breakages and a failure to extract the expected performance from the radical-looking, Marcelino Botin-designed AC75, team owner Ernesto Bertelli has effectively begun again with a clean sheet of paper.    

Taking full advantage of the relaxed nationality rules that the team negotiated so hard for prior to signing up to the America’s Cup Partnership, for AC38 Alinghi has recruited two top-name non-nationals to spearhead the campaign.