Rare interview of chief designer: Spaniard would build the fastest boat in the world for Alinghi Red Bull

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The exact date is still secret, but it will happen in April: in a few days, Alinghi Red Bull Racing will probably show its brand new high-tech yacht for the 2024 America’s Cup, which will take place in Barcelona in the autumn. The man behind the new boat is Marcelino Botin, the Spaniard is the chief designer of Geneva. The big question: will Botin immediately make a big impression for Alinghi’s return after fourteen years of absence from the sailing myth? «Of course I am under pressure, but that is normal in the America’s Cup. We want to win the cup, we don’t just want to be there,” says Botin, who almost never gives interviews.

For Blick, the design star makes an exception on a media day. Who is the man who has to build the fastest boat in the world from a blank sheet of paper at Alinghi? Botin comes from a famous banking family. His great-great-grandfather was one of the co-founders of Bank Santander, now one of the largest banks in the world. “My grandfather and one of my uncles were also president of the bank,” Botin says. “But my side of the family, including myself, isn’t really involved. I’m more interested in sailing.” His brother Gonzalo and cousin Diego are world-class sailors.

Alinghi has no experience with the sail samples

He made a career as a boat designer and was particularly fond of the America’s Cup as the “Formula 1 of sailing”. Botin has already been chief designer for cup teams from the US, Italy and New Zealand – and now in Switzerland. The Spaniard faced the challenge of his career at Alinghi. As a newcomer, Alinghi Red Bull misses the experience of the 2021 America’s Cup, when the new flying sail monsters of the AC75 spectacle class were raced for the first time. Botin: “The challenge is great. But we didn’t start from scratch because a lot of people from the other teams moved over to us.”

For months, Botin and his fifty-strong design team have been working on thousands of details of the superboat, which will now blow everyone’s socks off in April. Will the crew from Geneva even come up with a technical genius that will make the Swiss yacht faster than its opponents? Someone who has mastered this art in Formula 1 for decades is now Bodin’s sparring partner: Adrian Newey. Through the technical collaboration with Red Bull Racing, Bodin got to know the Formula 1 genius, the designer behind Max Verstappen’s series victories.

And Newey and Botin have something in common. They can no longer drive the racing machines they design themselves. Driving a sailing monster at a speed of over 100 km/h is like driving an F1 car to the limit. The Spaniard describes how the flying boats with the foils fascinate him even more when he works on them.

“These boats are crazy. Aerodynamics, hydrodynamics, hydraulics, electronics, foil design, sail design – tackling all this with a huge amount of effort is simply fantastic,” he says. Botin’s new litter is still a secret, only the name is known: BoatOne.

Source : Blick