The Tudor Pelagos FXD Alinghi Red Bull Racing Chronograph

You wouldn’t think that a landlocked country like Switzerland would have much in the way of involvement with competitive yachting, but thanks to two reasons, it does – Team Alinghi.

The first reason – or reasons – are Switzerland’s enormous lakes, including Lake Geneva and Lake Neuchâtel (and there are plenty of others). Sailing is a popular sport in Switzerland; the Société Nautique de Genève alone has around 3,000 members. The other factor is money – putting a modern sailing yacht in the water, especially one of the latest hydrofoils, costs tens of millions, and Switzerland has the highest wealth per capita in the world.

Between the two it was probably inevitable that Switzerland would sooner or later have a team competing in the single oldest and most prestigious event in yacht racing – the America’s Cup, which has been going on since 1851 when the yacht America won the eponymous Cup (colorfully called the Auld Mug) in a regatta around the Isle of Wight, racing against 15 yachts from the Royal Yacht Squadron. America successfully defended the America’s Cup from 1857 to 1983, which is the longest winning streak in any sport.

The Rules Of The Game: The America’s Cup ‘Deed Of Gift’

The win in 1851 had consequences still in effect today. The crew of the America gave the sterling silver prize Cup to the New York Yacht Club, under the terms of what’s called a Deed of Gift – basically a contract stipulating the terms under which a gift is given.

The Deed of Gift spelled out the conditions under which a team could issue an official challenge to whatever club held the Cup. In the America’s Cup, the defender is always the yacht club and team which won the previous America’s Cup; the challenger is a yacht club and team which can make a legal challenge. These terms included requirements for the challenger including that they are an organized club that holds an open ocean regatta at least once a year. The America’s Cup is not held at any specific interval; it occurs when a legally valid challenge is issued and accepted.

At first, the America’s Cup consisted of a one-on-one race between the defending club and the challenging club, but in 1970 there were multiple clubs challenging the New York Yacht Club and so, a challenger’s selection series was instituted, which is still with us today as the Louis Vuitton Cup – LV is also a sponsor of the America’s Cup itself.

The reason for this somewhat lengthy preamble is that it’s the background for Team Alinghi’s history in the sport. Team Alinghi was founded by Swiss billionaire Ernesto Bertarelli, who is one of a small group of wealthy yachting enthusiasts who have made modern yacht racing what it is today (another is Larry Ellison, who founded Oracle Team Racing, which races under the banner of the Golden Gate Yacht Club). “Alinghi” doesn’t mean anything in particular; it was a nonsense word Bertarelli and his sister  liked using as children (although now, heaven knows it means high tech open ocean yacht racing).

Alinghi, which races under the banner of the Société Nautique de Genève, challenged the Royal New Zealand Yacht Squadron in 2003, and defended the Cup successfully in 2007, but in 2010 the Cup was won by the challenger, the Golden Gate Yacht Club’s BMW Team Oracle, and shortly after, Alinghi announced that it wold no longer participate in the America’s Cup.

In 2023, however, the team announced it would challenge the current defender, New Zealand, and at the same time, announced its partnership with Tudor.

The Tudor Pelagos Alinghi Red Bull Chronograph

The name of the game in the America’s Cup, as in most regattas and yacht races, is counting down the time until competing yachts can legally cross the line. For this reason the Tudor Alinghi Red Bull Chronograph (M25807KN-0001) has a bezel set up as a countdown timer. You rotate the bezel so that the number corresponding to the countdown time is aligned with the minute hand, and the minute hand as it moves will count down to zero. The countdown bezel is a defining feature of the Pelagos FXD watches, which were originally designed for underwater dead-reckoning navigation, where the bezel would be used to count down the minutes required to transit between two waypoints.

One of the biggest challenges that yachts face in a race is making sure that they cross the start line as close to zero on the countdown as possible. Sailboats, unlike cars, cannot sit motionless at an arbitrary starting line. Instead, they must maneuver in close proximity to the finish line until, in the skipper’s judgement, they can begin their final approach. Even in conventional yachting this requires a great deal of experience. In the America’s Cup, however, the yachts are moving so much faster than conventional sailboats that the timing is even trickier – depending on the wind, wind direction, and sailing direction of the yacht, the 75 foot long, AC75 boats can hit speeds approaching 50 knots, which is almost 100 kph, or about 60 mph.

There are several reasons the America’s Cup yachts are so fast, but the main reason is that they are hardly sailing at all, in the conventional sense. The AC75 class yachts are hydrofoils – they have three sets of wings under the hull, two of which – on the port and starboard sides of the yacht – are mounted on pivoting arms. The wings are literally wings and just like the wings of an airplane, they provide lift; depending on the design, AC75 yachts can lift off out of the water at wind speeds as low as 7 knots. These wings are the reason hydrofoil yachts are so fast. Compared to a conventional yacht, there is almost no hydrodynamic drag; the only wetted surfaces when an AC75 is foiling, are the wings themselves and whatever part of their arms are immersed.

AC75 yachts do not have conventional keels, either – instead, the arms can pivot and the arm on the side of the boat receiving the wind, lifts up out of the water to provide a counterweight to the tipping force from the wind.

All this means that the yachts are constructed of materials designed to be as light and strong as possible, including carbon fiber and titanium – the only really massive elements are the foils themselves, thanks to the fact that they have to act as counterweights. The Tudor Pelagos Alinghi watches have cases made from forged carbon composite, with titanium bezels fitted with carbon composite countdown inserts. Fixed strap bars are used in order to keep the watches attached to the wrists of crewmen as securely as possible – thanks to the high speeds reached by AC75 yachts, crews can experience gale force winds and any water passing over the deck hits with tremendous force.

Given the environment for which they are designed, the watches have a dive-watch level of water resistance and of course, the Pelagos watch in general began life as purpose build dive watches, designed to specifications suitable for saturation diving. The Pelagos FXD Alinghi Red Bull Racing Chronograph is 200M water resistant.

The Louis Vuitton Cup challenger’s series is coming to a close and this year, Team Alinghi did not advance to the final rounds and will miss its chance to challenge New Zealand. This however is not entirely unexpected and is partly due to revisions to the racing rules, which are designed to give yacht designers as much latitude as possible in their designs.

Since the class is relatively new and the rules are relatively open, the 2024 America’s Cup is very much a design race, with few precedents on which to base designs – hulls, foils, sails and the various combinations thereof can be tested in software prototyping but at 140 million or more to construct an AC75 yacht, there were no chances to create physical prototypes and everything from specific wing configurations to even basic factors like whether or not crews should physically switch sides as a yacht tacks and gybes, sailing at an angle to wind direction either upwind or downwind, are left to the judgement of the designers.

This is a fascinating period of transition for the America’s Cup. The last time traditional monohull 12 meter yachts raced in the Cup was in 1987; the first hydrofoils raced in the Cup in 2013. The relationship between Tudor and Alinghi seems a natural one; Tudor is one of the biggest success stories in the last decade of watchmaking since the brand’s international relaunch in, 2007, and the America’s Cup has a lot of potential to draw interest orders of magnitude greater than it has in the past.

The incredibly high speeds of the AC75 class boats gives yacht racing a compelling visual appeal which it never had in the monohull, 12 meter days, and the audience for America’s Cup and other competitions using hydrofoil sailing yachts is growing every year. The only real issues facing wider interest in the sport are its cost and the associated perception that it is a billionaire boy’s club, but it costs roughly as much to compete in F1 as in AC75 racing and F1 racing draws nearly 70 million viewers per race. The 36th America’s Cup drew a little over 68 million viewers, in 2021 and it seems that for Tudor, the game is very much worth the candle.

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