Team Australia Races Against Clock With 12-Week AC75 Prep for 2027 Cup

Team Australia is racing against the calendar. In just under twelve weeks—eighty-three days to be precise—between the moment their AC75 first touches water in Naples and the opening race of the 38th America's Cup, the Australian challenger must transform a repurposed 2021 Cup winner into a competitive racing machine. It is an extraordinarily tight window, and everyone involved knows it.

Glenn Ashby, a three-time America's Cup winner who will be inducted into the Cup Hall of Fame next month, heads the performance and design operation for the team representing Sydney's Royal Prince Edward Yacht Club. The boat itself is being rebuilt in Auckland as part of a partnership with Emirates Team New Zealand, the current Cup champions and Ashby's former team. The two halves of the operation—the Australian shore team in Sydney and the build facility across the Tasman Sea—will converge in Naples in the first quarter of 2027. The AC75 will be splashed for a week of dock and systems testing before the official first day of sailing around March 1. "We're not hiding the fact that we're getting over there pretty late," Ashby said. "But that's hitting the target when we can."

The boat itself is barely recognizable from its 2021 form. Repurposing a six-year-old Cup winner for the 2027 campaign means stripping the interior down to the structural framing, removing the old bow and installing a new one to comply with construction rules, and replacing virtually every system. The cockpit has been reconfigured from eight positions to six. All manually powered systems—winches, grinding stations, control lines—have been eliminated. What remains is a bare shell that will be rebuilt with new electronics, new hydraulics, new batteries, and a completely new control architecture built around trigger devices and mechatronics. The crew will operate the boat through preset sequences initiated by a single action, orchestrating multiple functions at once. Ashby estimates the rebuild will consume somewhere close to twenty thousand hours of work—roughly ten man-years—spread across six or seven departments: electronics, hydraulics, composites, paint, engineering, and structures.

The partnership with Emirates Team New Zealand gives Team Australia a significant structural advantage. The Kiwi build team, which has constructed all three of the team's AC75s and performed the same repurposing of their own 2024 Cup winner, handles much of the composite and structural work. Australian team members have been embedded in the Auckland facility, while the Australian electronics, mechatronics, and hydraulics specialists work on the internal systems that define what an AC75 actually is. "A lot of our guys are fully immersed in our boat, and that relationship is massively important," Ashby said. The collaboration is more hands-on than the arrangement with the French La Roche-Posay team, which is building a copy of their boat in Europe. Here, the Australian crew is present for every stage of the transformation.

Team Australia also holds a competitive advantage that other challengers do not. Because the boat was launched in 2021, the team is exempt from the budget cap restrictions that constrain design and construction for other competitors. They can build new sails and a new mast—luxuries most other teams cannot afford. Southern Spars is currently building their new spar. The external hull form can be altered within limits, which the Australians are doing. "Once the boat goes on the water, it should be as good as a new one, effectively," Ashby said. "It's going to be turned into a very competitive nice package going forward."

The sailing squad announced by Team Australia includes four past America's Cup winners. Three of them sailed together on Oracle Racing during the 2013 comeback victory in San Francisco. Ashby himself won with Team New Zealand in 2017 and 2021. Others are active on the SailGP circuit and will factor into crew selection. The depth is intentional—injuries in SailGP and the last America's Cup taught the lesson that a team needs breadth to survive a compressed campaign. Ashby is currently recovering from a leg injury suffered in Bermuda in May while serving as a super-sub for the French SailGP team, but the recovery time has given him space to study reconnaissance footage from the three teams already sailing AC75s.

When asked whether he believed the team could get race-ready in just under twelve weeks, Ashby did not minimize the challenge. "I don't think there'd be too many sailing teams or shore teams that could do it," he said. "But I think we've assembled a pretty good squad. It's a big ask. Looking at the sailing team and the shore team that we're putting together, if there's any group of people that can do it, I think that's them." The team is already running simulator work, conducting systems training camps, and spending time together as a crew. They are studying how the lighter boat with new foils and battery power will handle differently than its predecessors. The pre-start phase of racing, Ashby believes, will be where the biggest tactical differences emerge in 2027—teams will attempt maneuvers that the lighter, more controllable boats can now execute. "How a team can utilise that opportunity will depend on how they set up their systems and the boat and how brave the sailing team are to actually push the limits of what the boats can actually do."

Reliability will be the obsession once the boat launches. The first two or three weeks on the water will likely determine early results. There is no margin for extended downtime during commissioning. Ashby denies that Team Australia is hedging its bets on 2029, when the Cup is expected to return to Naples. "We're 100% focused on 2027," he said. "My 100% focus is on next year and making sure that we're absolutely successful there." The bar is extremely high. The team is under no illusions about that. But they are betting that a crew of proven Cup winners, a boat exempt from budget restrictions, and a partnership with the defending champions can compress what would normally be an impossible timeline into something achievable. In eighty-three days, they will find out if they were right.