BMW Oracle have signed three-times Cup winner Russell Coutts to lead their next challenge for whatever came next.

The U.S. syndicate's challenge has not yet been accepted by defender Alinghi while a legal wrangle hangs in the air.

BMW Oracle owner Larry Ellison, who is suing Alinghi for what he says are unfair rules they have set up for the next America's Cup, said he had signed Coutts as both skipper and chief executive, a post previously filled by Chris Dickson, who was fired after Luna Rossa beat the American yacht 5-1 in the Louis Vuitton Cup semifinals in May.

"Larry's given me pretty much a clean sheet of paper," Coutts told a conference call for reporters. "I've come to the conclusion we both thought very similarly about how to put together a winning team."

"I agree there is a tremendous amount of work to assemble a team, to understand what BMW Oracle did last time," Coutts said. "There were a lot of very, very good things done and we need to try and build on that as well as bring in new people ... We'll be working hard at that over the next period of time," .

Coutts led teams from New Zealand to back-to-back Cups in the late 1990s before he and the core of his Kiwi crew joined Swiss biotech billionaire Ernesto Bertarelli's Alinghi in 2000.

The 45-year-old Coutts, who has lost only once in 37 match races and who is 14-0 in the America's Cup final, skippered the Swiss team to victory on its first try. He subsequently fell out with Bertarelli and signed an agreement not to work with any of the challengers for the 32nd edition in Valencia.