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Land Rover BAR, skippered by Ben Ainslie, races during the 35th America’s Cup Challenger playoffs on June 8 in Bermuda’s Great Sound. ‘The technology of sport drives the technology of production cars. It’s the same thing for boats,’ the team’s CEO says.MARK LLOYD/AFP / Getty Images

After two years of research and training, with 35,000 person-hours of preparation, it finally came down to less than 20 minutes on the water here on World Oceans Day. Land Rover BAR's racing yacht lost to New Zealand in the Challenger's playoffs and the team was sent home to Portsmouth, England, its dream of winning the America's Cup put on hold until at least 2019. Their $150-million (U.S.) bid to "bring the Cup home" had failed, yet right after the British team was eliminated, Land Rover announced it would continue its sponsorship through to the next Cup challenge.

Why? Land Rover builds land-lubbing SUVs, not boats.

"This is the pinnacle of high tech," says Ian Anderton, Land Rover's head of aerodynamics and thermal management. "Where Land Rover can help is with aerodynamics research. Because of what we've been able to explore with fluid-structure interaction, we can now move on with developing tools and processes to make the most of what we know.

"It's a bit like we've got to do this. It's like a parallel-funded research stream for us. Granted, we have to modify it slightly to apply it to vehicles, but it's the same essence – it's the same principle. It's a level of modelling we simply weren't doing before and you can't do this in a wind tunnel."

The racing yachts of the America's Cup actually spend very little time in water. They quite literally fly over the surface, with three tonnes of weight supported on an aerofoil beneath the hull that's "the size of an ironing board," says Martin Whitmarsh, the team's chief executive officer. When it's going well, less than 1 per cent of the boat is touching the water, and the water it's touching is under such great pressure that it's boiling.

"This really is Formula One on water," says Whitmarsh, who should know what he's talking about – he came to Land Rover BAR after managing McLaren's Formula One racing team. There's plenty of excitement in the racing: Boats crash into one another and sometimes capsize. There's danger, too: A British sailor was drowned in 2013, when he was trapped beneath his overturned yacht.

"Formula One is a hotbed for developing new vehicles, and the white heat of competition speeds that development," Whitmarsh says. "The technology of sport drives the technology of production cars. It's the same thing for boats, and what we learn in the America's Cup will transform both boating and [production] cars.

"Like Formula One, this is a catalyst for development. The sport motivates us to improve and make things better and that's exactly what we're doing. We're motivated to be quick, and to go quick, you have to be efficient. To go three-and-a-half times the speed of the wind, you have to be bloody efficient."

The 15-metre racing boats are powered entirely by wind and the muscle of the six-member team. They can exceed 40 knots at full speed, which is more than 70 kilometres an hour. There's a skipper and a trimmer and a tactician, who plots the course, and also "grinders" who spin rotors by hand to create energy that's used to move the sail and raise and lower the foils.

It's all extremely physical, and the grinders will rest their arms whenever possible in ice-cold tubes. At the end of a race, they'll take an ice bath. "Well, it's actually a wheelie bin," one admits, dialling back the sport's exotic reputation. "We'll sit in a wheelie bin full of ice water. It's the worst part of the whole race."

The grinders are also creating power that must be efficiently stored for when it's needed, and the understanding of battery management and regenerative power is critical for a modern car company. Jaguar Land Rover does not have any hybrids or plug-in hybrids in its lineup of cars and SUVs, but it's working on them.

BAR stands for Ben Ainslie Racing, named for the team's skipper and captain of the winning boat in the last running of the Cup in 2013. Sir Ben Ainslie is an Olympic gold medalist and all-round British hero, and he's the sailor who steers the boat while the other five team members run back and forth with their specialized tasks.

There are 350 independent sensors on board, registering data 500 times a second, and they create up to 189 million points of information for every time the boat goes out. It's the same thing with cars, and Land Rover had to develop computer systems that can properly understand and analyze the huge amount of information they're receiving.

"There are reasons why today's cars are designed the way they are, but they needn't be," Anderton says. "This sort of an experience [of designing an efficient boat] allows you to see those things more clearly and start to work towards them as an engineering group within Jaguar Land Rover, and actually begin to very much refine what we think of as a vehicle and how we put them together."

The work is already under way, analyzing the billions of points of data collected and tweaking the design of the racing boat to add a fraction of a knot here and a knot there. Land Rover hopes its new knowledge will help it build a better SUV, and if it can finally bring the America's Cup home to Britain – well, that's just all the better, isn't it?

Racing for the America's Cup is scheduled to resume June 17.

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