Team Prada Unveils Luna Rossa ITA 45

Team Prada will unveil today the International America's Cup Class yacht Luna Rossa ITA 45 which will race in the Louis Vuitton Cup Finals.

After 30 minutes dedicated to the Media, at 18.30 local time the operations base of team Prada will be opened to the public for the first time ever since the beginning of the Louis Vuitton Cup. Everybody will have a chance to take a close look at Luna Rossa ITA 45 without veils; up to now the boats have always been covered by "skirts".

One hour after Prada, AmericaOne will unveil USA 61, the second boat which was raced in the Semi-finals, whilst Team New Zealand unveiled its two boats NZL 57 and NZL 60 at 12.30 local time. This is an extremely important time for the designers of both challengers as the long phase of testing on the boats has now ended. With the beginning of the Finals there will be no more time to work on substantial design alterations. One of the boats which the teams have chosen to race in the Finals will be the same to advance to the America's Cup match against Team New Zealand. According to the rules it is not possible to change boat between the Finals and the America's Cup, whilst it is possible to make modifications to the hull (within the restrictions set by the rules) and to the appendages. It is therefore an extremely delicate decision for both Finalists.

According to Francesco de Angelis, skipper and helmsman of Luna Rossa, "It was a joint decision of the team". Claudio Maletto, one of the designers of team Prada, said: "We decided to race with Luna Rossa ITA 45 (already used in the first two Round Robins and in the Semi-finals) as we agreed that it would be the best boat to race against Team New Zealand should we advance to the America's Cup match. Luna Rossa ITA 45 has been tested many times in different weather conditions against all the other challengers. It has been a global decision, resulting from an accurate analysis of the strengths of the two boats Luna Rossa ITA 45 and ITA 48 in comparison with our opponents, taking into consideration also the weather conditions which we expect to race in".

Designing an IACC yacht requires much R&D work. It is necessary to develop a set of instruments which allow the designers to predict a yacht performance starting from the analysis of the experimental data. Besides tank testing with models, great emphasis is put on the development of CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) codes and of prediction tools such as the VPP (Velocity Prediction Programme). Confirmation of the results obtained by numerical computational testing is one of the most difficult aspects of the whole R&D process. The use of these design instruments requires specific technical knowledge of the subject and this implies the involvement of a number of experts in the various areas who, together with the yacht designers, form the Prada design team. Luna Rossa was designed by Doug Peterson and German Frers in collaboration with David Egan, German Frers Jr, Claudio Maletto, Andrea Avaldi, Giovanni Belgrano and Guido Cavalazzi (Sails Designer). The results were achieved thanks to the successful co-operation with our Technology Partners, world leading companies in their fields:

• INSEAN (Vasca Navale) - Istituto Nazionale per Studi ed Esperienze di Architettura Navale
• ENGINEOUS SOFTWARE Inc. (Engineering Software Automation Optimization) - http://www.engineous.com
• CEI, Inc. (Engineering visualization software) - www.ceintl.com
• ICEMCFD (Mesh generation software) - www.icemcfd.com
• SILICON GRAPHICS INC. (SGI - Computer systems) - www.sgi.com
• PARAMETRIC TECHNOLOGY CORPORATION (PTC - Engineering design and analysis software) www.ptc.com

More Information: America's Cup Resources