Stefano Beltrando, the composite “Doctor” taking care of Luna Rossa

The AC 75s of the America’s Cup are complex boats, requiring continuous maintenance, built on the limits of the regulations and for that reason also fragile.

Each syndicate has an ultra-specialized shore team of engineers and technicians to run the boats ashore. In Luna Rossa, one of the key men is Stefano Beltrando, a composite genius, who takes care of the Italian boat and puts her in a position to be pushed 100% every day by the mailing team.

Our Ida Castiglioni tells us about his profile and explains why he is one of the key men in Red Moon.

Stefano Beltrando – Luna Rossa’s “doctor”

by Ida Castiglioni Ahead of the second day of the finals, he spent the entire day ultrasounding every part of Luna Rossa, from hull to mast, deck to arms.
Locked like the entire shore team (about fifty professionals) in the inaccessible shed at Luna Rossa’s base. I am referring to Stefano Beltrando, and he was mentioned in the America’s Cup news because, thanks to this technology, last week he was able to verify that Luna Rossa’s mast and hull had not been damaged after the mainsail rail broke.
Stefano Beltrando is 48 years old and has been commuting to the world for a couple of decades or more.
Because an ingenious insight of his in the 1990s, back in the days when he was attending the faculty of Chemistry in Turin and studying Materials Science (a branch that brings chemistry and physics together), turned him into a kind of ‘dowsing wizard’ of Industry 4.0, always on the lookout for hidden flaws in composite materials. When he arrives at airport security checkpoints, scanners and probes emerge from his carry-on luggage, and the scene is almost always the same.
Facing the inquisitive gaze of the one who is poking around, he responds promptly-“sonographer.”
And the other immediately asks him “doctor?”
And he confirms with a nod because then everything is much simpler and more understandable.
Go explain to him that those ‘tools’ are the result of obsessive research he began 25 years earlier in the semiconductor industry and then in Alenia for the metal control, or even after France at Ciotec, where he is trying to set up instrumentation to control the carbon shafts of Grand Mistrals with ultrasound. Stefano was born in the Ivrea area (where industrialists had preferred electronics) and lives in Piverone, a town on the shores of Lake Viverone, a body of water known in the sports news for powerboat racing.
In this wave-less lake, speedboats have been whizzing by since the last century at speeds that were once exaggerated but that Luna Rossa now achieves with only the wind and by polluting less.
Sailing historically has not been the favorite sport of those who live on these shores, but Stephen, thanks to the imagination of some public school teachers, took an innovative course as a child in which they taught kids how to sail Optimists and, at the same time, helped them build them with plywood boards and (mostly) the goodwill of the teachers.
As many as eight Optimists would be built and put in the water in those years, and on Lampo – one of them – Stefano and Miriam’s two children later learned to sail.
For the story to follow, Beltrando’s meeting in Turin with Miriam Cerutti, who was attending a different faculty and majoring in physics with an environmental focus, was certainly not coincidental.
Miriam, in addition to being a high-level technician, has been a backbone ‘structure’ of the team since the beginning, and here in Barcelona she is an advisor to the Alinghi consortium along with Turin-based Ariberto Strobino and Edoardo Perotto. Returning to Piverone and the lake, Stefano in recent years has set himself the goal of taking the village’s children boating and getting them interested in sailing.
Of the 400 or so kids he has involved, about 10 have become skilled sailors and are engaged in offshore racing. In 1999 he obtained an INSTM (National Institute for Materials Science and Technology) grant and traveled around Europe to visit factories that use composite materials: boatyards, companies that build wind turbines and their structures, and automotive industries. Over the years, Bertrando has acquired unique know-how thanks to his insistence on pursuing his initial obsession, which was then to see inside composite artifacts.
It is important to remember that, as far as masts and other carbon parts of racing boats are concerned, in the 1990s this material was crafted. Virtually no one was checking the quality of what they were producing, and the few inspection tools available were not able to do so because in boating, the artifacts were of low quality (because they contained too much air between the layers). Not only were there no proper tools to detect damage and defects, but a nomenclature to indicate and define them had not yet been ‘codified’.
The final step for Stephen comes after seeing in use the technology, adopted in the quarries, to ‘peer’ inside the marble blocks and avoid those containing voids or defects, before cutting them and turning them into slabs.

It is at this point that he understands what it takes to arrive at a thorough diagnostic capability of composites, and he becomes ingenious in assembling innovative instruments. (But in the dissertation he was preparing he had written down how it should be done.)
With this acquired know-how he started QI Composites and by the late 1990s was already engaged in nondestructive ultrasonic hull inspection for state-of-the-art shipyards. At this point the company became an industry leader and started consultancies around the world: from wind turbines in the Netherlands, to irrigation pipelines in South America, to boats from the Wally shipyard (this was 1999), to Formula 1 post-race checks for Ferrari (he began collaborating in 2012), to fine-tuning an exoskeleton for arm mobility.
For the sailing world, where hull and mast soundness are prerequisites for being competitive, these checks are basic, especially in competitions where technology dominates, such as in the America’s Cup and round-the-world races. In the last four editions of the Volvo Ocean Race, his company becomes Non-Destructive Testing (NDT) Official Supplier while its presence on teams competing for the America’s Cup dates back to Valencia. In fact, for the 2007 America’s Cup, Stephen is the advisor to nine out of eleven teams (excluding the Swiss and Chinese); for Oracle’s 2010 challenge to Alinghi, he is on the Alinghi team, the boat (built in the Décision shipyard on Lake Geneva) on which, thanks to a technology new to the nautical industry, fiber optics are inserted everywhere from the hull to the daggerboards (the first foil dinghies).
For the 2013 and 2017 editions of the America’s Cup, he is a consultant to Artemis, the consortium for the Swedish challenge.
In the fine-tuning phase of the AC75s for the 2021 Cup he is contracted to test the One Design Arms, which Persico then provided to all teams.
For the 2024 edition of the Cup he gave assistance during the construction of the Italian AC75, while in Barcelona his presence in Luna Rossa’s team is constant and essential.
The QI Composites team consists of 15 technicians, some present from the first hour, working on several fronts.
In conclusion, Stephen notes that over the past 25 years there has been a definite evolution in the production of carbon artifacts but makes two observations.
First, we have reached the point where the reality of the product totally corresponds to its design, but then culture is not enough, experience is needed. Second (last, but not least), the composite continues to evolve, and metal-both milled and 3D printed-is becoming a component that complements and enhances the performance of several carbon components: we see this very clearly-as well as in the America’s Cup-in the automotive field, such as in the manufacture of high-performance carbon-framed bicycles.