Its racing time as the USA Racing season i that is scheduled to take place in February 2010 in Valencia. This time its a season of greater innovation, passion as the team BMWOracle comes with a extraordinary extreme engineering passionate gargantuan, motorized, solid carbon-fiber wing, nearly twice the size of a Boeing 747 wing at 190ft, or 57 meters tall. The design allows the boat to sail with a speed of 2.5 times the speed of the wind.
This is the biggest ever wings fitted to a boat in the history. Its 190ft (57 metres) tall, it’s 80% bigger than the wing of a Boeing 747 weighing 7,770 pounds (3,524kg). At its widest point, it spans 30 feet (9 metres) and it has a total surface area of 6725 square feet (625 square metres). The wings are built from carbon fibre and kevlar, with an ultra-smooth aeronautical film cover to ensure maximal airflow. Building the wing alone took nearly 40,000 man hours.
The benefit of having a wing as opposed to a traditional fabric sail is that the wing never deforms against the wind – its shape is constant, and with the flap system taken into account, its shape can be very precisely controlled. Combined with the trimaran hull, the wing should allow the BOR 90 to sail into a headwind at angles less than 30 degrees – and, rumor has it, in ideal conditions to make it up to 2.5 times wind speed.
With this the team gets a trail run at Spanish waters yesterday with the aim to defeat defending champion, team Alinghi with its new boat, a 90ft catamaran called Alinghi 5.
