MEET THE FRESH FACES OF AMERICA'S CUP DESIGN
The next generation of North Sails designers who all grasped the coveted opportunity to play key roles on yacht racing's grandest stage.
by Herb McCormick
When it comes to mounting a winning America’s Cup campaign, the formula is fairly straightforward: You need strong financial backing, a committed group of sailors and designers…and North Sails. On the eve of the 37th edition of the America’s Cup—set to be contested in Barcelona, Spain, this fall—those elements remain unchanged, especially the latter. After all, each of the six syndicates vying for the Cup will be powered by North Sails utilizing North 3Di sail technology and the North Design Suite, the most advanced sail design and aero simulation tools in sailmaking.
What’s different this time, from the perspective of the North Sails team, is an exciting blend of the tried and true, and the fresh and new. The savvy, well-tested leader of the program is North Sails Director of Design and Engineering JB Braun. A veteran of multiple America's Cup campaigns, for the 2024 Cup races in Barcelona, Braun is serving as a sail designer for Great Britain's Challenger of Record, INEOS Britannia.
However, a quartet of young North Sails designers, engineers and sailmakers represent a new vanguard for the company, and in doing so, serve as a bridge between the past, the present and the future. To varying degrees, Max Tringale (New York Yacht Club American Magic), Mathieu Guillaud (Orient Express Racing Team), Quentin Abeille (Alinghi Red Bull Racing) and Tono Martinez (INEOS Brittania) may be fresh faces in America’s Cup circles. And all four bring different sailing and schooling backgrounds to the table. But they also share an important attribute: They’ve all grasped the major opportunity to play key roles on yacht-racing’s grandest stage. And they’re doing so alongside some of the world’s best, most experienced sail designers.
📸 INEOS Britannia | Spaniard Tono Martinez is the senior member of the young designers crew. His role with the Challenger of Record is heavily focused on the software side of sail design.
“We’re developing the future with these guys,” said Braun. “The future of North Sails and the sailmaking industry with (a new generation) of designers, engineers and scientists. Each of them has a North Sails mentor that they’re working with, seasoned experts in the field helping these younger guys coming along. And they’re all filling different roles in the syndicates they’re involved with."
“For instance," Braun continued, "Max Tringale worked with me for several years in our Marblehead loft. So he received a sail-design class there every day. And he has Juan Messenger, another North Sails engineer from Spain, working alongside him with American Magic. Quentin Abeille is a sailor and software engineer who's worked with me and Michael Richelsen on the developmental side of things focusing on Warps, the proprietary software that we use to develop the mechanical structure of sails. Quentin then got involved with Alinghi and is learning more from Julien Pilate and Steve Calder.”
“Tono Martinez is working alongside me and Mickey Ickert here at INEOS but his mentor was Jeremy Elliot working at North Design Services in England, so he got a lot of exposure from an expert in that area. And Mathieu Guillaud was down in New Zealand at the Auckland loft and was associated with Burns Fallows and that group, and now he’s working alongside Magnus Doole with the French team. So, yes, they’re all young designers making their way, supported by a whole group of senior designers with America’s Cup experience to guide them along.”
📸 NYYC American Magic | Max Tringale is a sail designer with NYYC American Magic. He began his sailing career in Optis, has worked at North Sails' 3D manufacturing loft, and has designed sails for Charlie Enright's 11th Hour Racing Team.
For Max Tringale, his winding journey from working in a full-service Cape Cod boatyard as a teenager (“It kind of got me into the industry…”) to joining American Magic’s challenge for the America’s Cup seems almost pre-ordained. An Opti sailor as a kid, after high school he matriculated to Maine’s renowned Landing School where he studied boatbuilding, electrical systems and diesel engines, but it was the design course he took that really grasped his attention. So much so that his next big step was enrolling at Southampton Solent University in the U.K., where he earned his bachelor’s degree in yacht design. “That was kind of my arc into the design world,” he said.
After a stint at naval architect David Pedrick’s office in Newport, Rhode Island, by chance he was racing aboard a Tripp 41 with North Sails’ Dan Neri, who suggested he give sailmaking a try. “Dan said they were looking to hire some younger designers and bring them into the company if they thought it was the right fit,” he said. It indeed proved to be a good match, and in 2016 Tringale found himself in Minden, Nevada at North Sails’ 3Di manufacturing hub. “Pretty eye-opening,” he admitted. “This whole other world of sail design really started to catch on. I got into the science and engineering of sails, which turned out to be really interesting to me.”
After Minden, Tringale’s next step was working with North Sails France on Charlie Enright’s 11th Hour Racing Team in his successful quest to win the 2022-23 edition of The Ocean Race. As that was winding down, the American Magic program was ramping up, and Tringale was in the right place at the right time. It’s been a fascinating experience. “We have a really great design team and processes that we’ve developed over the last couple of years,” he said. “On racing and sailing days, we have a pretty good workflow with our VPP teams and performance teams on figuring out what sail shapes are fast and what we want to achieve with our tools, and interpreting what they tell us.”
At 34, Spaniard Tono Martinez is the senior member of the young designer’s crew, and his road to the INEOS Britannia America’s Cup program was a long and winding one. Unlike many young sailors, he didn’t begin racing on dinghies but aboard full-fledged keelboats, starting with a Grand Soleil 40 and moving up to other designs, including an X-41. His father, who managed the North Sails Valencia loft, served as his coach but was also involved with top Spanish sailor Juan Messenger (yes, the very same North Sails designer now with the American Magic team), who proved to be an inspiration.
Martinez said, “I met Juan, who was doing America’s Cups and Volvo Ocean Races and I said to my dad, ‘When I grow up I want to be like him.’ I got to meet him and sail with him, and he helped me a lot with choosing what to study and where to go.” Martinez had already earned a degree in naval architecture, but when Messenger suggested he travel to New Zealand to study for his master’s degree in mechanical engineering, he was all in.
It also led to a hands-on job at North Sails Auckland, which was doubly beneficial: “I wanted experience on the floor of a sail loft, but at the same time I wanted to study English and get better at it.” Once back in Europe, with his studies completed, he met Jeremy Elliott and eventually came aboard with INEOS. Unlike his peers, who are all currently living in Barcelona, Martinez is still based in the U.K. at the North Sails loft in Lymington.
Martinez said that his job these days, while heavily focused on the software side of the equation, “Is a bit of a mixture. I work with the sail designers, but I’m also the link between the designers and the performance team.” But he’s also been to Barcelona to see the AC 75’s sailing: “This Cup is so different from the first one I saw in Valencia when I was a kid. And the boats are so different. But in the future, I think I could apply some of the things I’ve learned in this America’s Cup to all boats.”
At the other end of the age spectrum, at 27, Quentin Abeille is the youngest member of this group. Growing up in France in the sailing-crazed coastal city of Saint-Malo, Abeille took the more traditional route for junior sailors by racing in Optimists and Lasers. But his true calling was not sailing but science. At ISAE-Supaero in Toulouse, he earned his master’s degree in aeronautical engineering with a specialization in fluid dynamics. The next step led to his current role with Alinghi Red Bull Racing.
📸 Alinghi Red Bull Racing | Quentin Abeille hails from the sailing-crazed coastal city of Saint-Malo, France. He holds a master’s degree in aeronautical engineering, specializing in fluid dynamics. In Alinghi Red Bull Racing's quest for the Cup, Quentin is joined by North Sails sails designers Steve Calder and Julian Pilate.
“For my final year of my masters, I had to do a 6-month internship, so I applied to North Sails France,” he said. “That’s where I met Julian Pilate, Michael Richelsen, Gautier Sergent and the whole team. After the internship, they offered me a job working on the aerodynamic studies that we do for clients and also on the software development, and eventually I moved on to Warps, which is a 3Di taping software we use on a daily basis.”
After Sergent sadly and unexpectedly passed away earlier this year, Pilate reached out to Abeille to see if he was interested in joining the Alinghi campaign. “He was looking for someone to come in and help finish the program. He’d already recruited Steve Calder to work on the design and molds. He wanted me to join him for the taping layout and also help with the different studies we make to find the right solutions. I mostly work on the taping layout because I know the software very well.”
Alinghi’s tight 3-person design team has a lot on their plates. “At Alinghi we’re using the full North Design Suite that allows us to design the sails and run simulations of their flying shapes,” he said. “We model the shapes using the software to see which layout is better. So there’s a difference when working on the design phase and the performance phase. So my job can vary a lot depending on the current needs of the rest of the team.”
Frenchman Mathieu Guillaud is a natural fit for France’s Orient Express Racing Team, but like Martinez, much of his early sailmaking foundation was forged on his formidable experience working for North Sails Auckland. After earning his master’s degree in mechanical engineering in France, he headed for New Zealand, at first thinking he might spend a year or so. He ended up spending seven years there.
📸 Orient Express Racing Team | Mathieu Guillaud gained a wealth of experience early in his career working for North Sails Auckland. That experience served him well upon joining Orient Express Racing Team and working closely with senior sail designer and New Zealand native Magnus Doole.
“It felt like an adventure to start,” he said. “I was also hoping to get my English on track, because in Europe, if you want to work on international projects, you need to speak English. I went to the loft and said I want to design sails. At the time, Magnus was there and said they weren’t looking for a designer. So I asked if could learn to build sails on the floor, to be a real sailmaker. He had a 3-month gig if I wanted to try, and from there I just kept going and going.”
Guillaud also started sailing—a lot—on a wide variety of race boats, which came with the added benefit of sailing with hard-core Kiwi racers, some of the best in the world. “The great thing was that I went to work and then went sailing with those same people who have very good ideas of what it takes to sail those boats. So you learn a lot and you can replicate that on the loft floor or even when you design sails, you can basically put all your knowledge to use.”
Those experiences served him very well when he joined the French Cup effort. “Our team isn’t as big as the others, so you’ve got to be able to do a little bit of everything,” he said. “So I do a lot of sail design as my standard work, which is how I got started with Team France. But it just got bigger and now I work in both design and production. It’s the kind of work I like because you get to see both sides of it. So that’s pretty sweet.”
“Pretty sweet” sums up the current day-to-day existence of all four of these youthful members of the North Sails team. The next America’s Cup regatta will soon be underway. And the respective careers of these youthful North Sails hands are also just getting started.
