Luna Rossa, the day after still stings: analysis of a defeat that hurts

We want to start with a premise: the Giornale della Vela wants to thank Luna Rossa for giving us another dream.
We are sure that yesterday and today in Italy there were many people who approached the world of sailing thanks to Luna Rossa, many young people who were inspired by the exploits of the Italian boat.
So we look forward to what the next chapters of this story will be.
Since yesterday afternoon, however, we feel this melancholic air of a fading dream, it is hard to mask the disappointment for the outcome of the final against Ineos Britannia, the load of expectations was also very important this time.
We discussed at length in the editorial staff what slant to give to the Cup Process yesterday, with the desire to try to analyze also on the web pages of our newspaper what were the dynamics that led toLuna Rossa’s exit from this America’s Cup.
We do not pretend to give answers, those can only be given by the protagonists, however, we try to give our own reading to what happened.

Boat fragility and bad luck

We will talk about the boat’s performance in a moment, here, however, we try to understand how much the boat’s alleged unreliability really affected Luna Rossa’s campaign and how much a bit of bad luck did not get in the way.
Going to analyze the regattas lost by Luna Rossa due to failures, two (one at the preliminaries) can be attributed to problems with the software that moves the arms, a component that is not under the direct control of the team being One Design and supplied to all the same. One retirement was caused by the mainsail carriage breaking, and in this case one can imagine a problem due to material fatigue or a structural evaluation that showed a flaw in the process.
Another retirement, this one in the finals, was caused by broken battens, and perhaps a bit of bad luck played its part here.
Finally, the dreadful gybing cost another point against Ineos, on this one the crew admitted to a maneuvering error (shortly after a technical problem still at the arm).
Let’s say Luna Rossa was not lucky in the episodes, but these lost points are not all to be attributed to bad luck.

The attitude to risk

We have been writing this for some time, but it is actually a basic rule of the modern America’s Cup: those who do not take risks do not win in the end. Taking risks in an America’s Cup challenge means daring first of all from a design point of view, and then in the choices of men in each individual syndicate department, as well as in the overall approach to the campaign.
In the last America’s Cup fatal to Luna Rossa was a design approach that was too conservative: the second AC 75 put in the water differed little from the first, and the Y-shaped appendages proved too slow compared to the T-shaped ones, with very little surface area, of the New Zealanders.

In this Cup, on the other hand, Luna Rossa dared, and a lot, on the design, aiming for a boat with reduced exposed surface area, with T-shaped appendages that proved effective and fast, and with an overall foil-boat-sail-system package that seemed to function very well. From the numbers we analyzed with Federico Albano at the Cup Trial we can see how Luna Rossa, especially upwind, was one of the fastest boats in the fleet, perhaps even faster than Team New Zealand in the round robins.
It was not equally so in the stern, but overall we are talking about a boat that had what it takes to play with all the others. It dared less the Italian challenge on crew selection, opting for the criterion of experience. Bruni, Spithill, Tesei and Molineris, were among the reconfirmed sailing team members from the last Cup and those with more experience inside Luna Rossa.
Max Sirena wanted to include fresh forces such as Marco Gradoni, Vittorio Bissaro, and Ruggero Tita, who in the Jeddah preliminaries on the AC 40s had played it out on an equal footing with the New Zealand holy monsters, confirming the goodness of the choice. The campaign, however, was not set up anticipating their role in the sailing team that would be fielded in the Cup.
This was also evident in the sailing hours that were recorded in the Recon reports: on the AC 40 and the Leq 12, Tita, Bissaro and Gradoni sailed a good number of hours, less on the 75.
Of Tita, we know that his Olympic commitment has kept him away from training with Luna Rossa. Was there perhaps another way to try to manage the two-time Olympic gold medalist? It is not for us to say, but the choice was made to focus on those who, data in hand, would have more hours overall than him at the helm of the boat.
On Marco Gradoni, on the other hand, it was known from the beginning that his most likely placement would be towards the Youth crew, where he shined contributing to the team’s victory.

There remains the unknown Vittorio Bissaro: the talented former Nacra 17 world champion was not even included in the trimmer rotations and was given a reduced number of hours on the AC 75.
We cannot judge, not having the expertise, the technical reason for this choice, but in his case there was a chance to include him at least in the rotations with the other two trimmers, being free from the Olympic campaign he had interrupted.
Bissaro, who has a helmsman/tactician identity, as well as being a foil wizard and aerospace engineer, could have made a multi-skilled contribution to the crew. Overall, we can perhaps say that the attitude to risk, in the sailing team’s choices, was more modest than the design approach.

Departures and coaching

The game with the AC 75 is so complex that we do not dare to give technical evaluations of the starts.
We simply observe that the pre-start pattern proposed by Luna Rossa was almost always the same during the final and in general during the Louis Vuitton Cup.
On the eve of the last match trimmer Andrea Tesei in post race interviews had admitted, “they have learned to read our moves and do something different, we will have to try to study something too,” but in the decisive regatta a different approach did not come.

Max, a silent leader

Max Sirena has, legitimately, decided to curtail interviews with the media. The Sirena statements we received, throughout the Cup, were those made on video, or in official releases, by Luna Rossa’s press office, and disseminated equally to all media.
The Team Director spoke a few times to television stations, almost never to the print media, and left all official press conferences to Bruni and Spithill and post race interviews to them and other members of the sailing team.
The press was allowed a brief informal meeting on the eve of the last regatta.
We expected perhaps on the last day Max to go to the mixed zone once he got ashore, but it was Spithill and cyclor Rossetti who came to the microphones. We respect Sirena’s choice, we would have liked that on difficult days he protected more and his people and spared them the long mixed zone at the end of the day.
Between TV and print media, for sailors, interviews last more than 1 hour, and they are still a waste of mental energy especially when on the water did not go well and you have to repeat to every single reporter what your mistakes were.
Also because, after 1 hour of via crucis in front of the media, debriefings begin ahead of the next races, and the management of mental and physical energies, given the commitment these boats impose, is relevant. We praised Max when we saw him get into the boat armed with a ribbon, the first to get his hands dirty to get Luna Rossa back in the race, as a true leader.
We would have done the same in seeing him shield Bruni and Spithill on the toughest days, trying to lock the two helmsmen in a bubble and save them some energy. As fans we believed it again this time and we will always continue to do so, thanking the Bertelli and Prada families, Max Sirena and the whole team, for what they have done for Italian sailing over the past 25 years and what they will continue to do.
However, we like to imagine that inside Luna Rossa this morning everyone woke up, and as soon as they set foot ashore they thought: now we are sick of losing. Mauro Giuffrè