To be fair, the company that built the boat and installed the systems was/is a US company, formally based in Anacortes, WA, is a subsidiary of Oracle and is fully owned by Larry Ellison. He moved it to New Zealand. Kiwis do work at it The purported technology itself was developed by Boing 40 years ago. So Ellison bought US technology and had a US company modify it for a boat and installed it using Kiwis who worked for him.

It would be like saying Apple buys their iPhone technology from China.

The TNZ boat was designed and developed by a US company, BTW.

I'm not taking anything away from NZ here, just reporting the facts and placing credit a bit more fairly.

Also, the purported (I'm using that word because no real confirmed info is available yet) control system has been on the boat since the start of racing. TNZ already asked for a judgement on it and it was deemed legal (the case was tossed on a technicality that TNZ did not file in time, but the rules committee was very specific about how they would have ruled it legal regardless). Oracle could never get it to work and had not been using it. Once they started losing so badly, they made a crash effort to change things on the boat. Getting this system to work correctly may have been one of those changes (again, nobody knows yet).

One thing is for sure, they made a BIG bet on weather. They modified their boat so that any light air would have crushed them - they were set for higher winds only, with the necessity of needing to foil upwind at a particular speed to win any races. If conditions were such that they could not foil upwind (or downwind, for that matter), they would have lost big time. If you saw the VMG graphics during their upwind foiling, you saw that their angles were much wider and their VMG only besting TNZ's when they hit boat speeds of 28kts or so.

The class rules for the boats are very specific on control systems - computers and data analysis systems are allowed, batteries are allowed to run computers and control the position of valves and solenoids only, any electrical operation of valves or solenoids must receive manual input only, any data system must be physically separate and completely isolated from the electrical operation of the valves, and all translational movement of boat parts must be manual.

This makes it difficult to understand how an automatic control system could be found legal by the rules committee unless Spithill was wired with shock pads to press buttons like a monkey in a psychology experiment. Or maybe he pushed a button continuously and a computer decided if it needed that button pushed and what valve it needed to be pushed for and some mechanical system operated the valve. THAT would be a creative way around the rules!

Sounds like some steampunk type of thing!

BTW, I don't think there has ever been an America's Cup with a level playing field. There has always been faster boats and higher technology, and those have almost always won. It is, and has always been, as much of the event as the actual racing.

Mark