China Team published today an interview with its technical director Luc Gellusseau. Some excerpts.

CHN95 is your 4th boat. How would you define her?

It is an original boat for several reasons. First of all, the story of her conception is unique.

We formed a task force with only a few people with a lot of experience and we asked them to design and build a boat that would have the potential to compete with the best, with no design compromise.

What do you mean exactly by that?

The designers were free to do what they felt was best. We didn’t tell them "the boat has to be so, it has to look like this."

On the other hand, they had big constraints : time, as they only had three and a half months to design her, and the obligation of using an existing deck and structure, those of CHN69 … for financial reasons as usual!

Thanks to their skills and their multi America’s cup experience, this was made possible. And we have carefully examined changes on other team’s boats. This freedom with constraints forced the designers to be creative.

After that, we had to build the boat. It was a pretty big adventure to build a racing boat in China, something that had never been done before. That was original by itself.

Rumour has it that CHN95 is part of a trend?

I don’t know, it doesn’t really mean anything. I would need to see the other boats to comment. Who has really seen enough new boats to be able to say that such and such a boat is "part of a trend?" I haven’t anyway.

We have a bowsprit which means that we had to push the volumes forward. I’m not sure that other boats have a bowsprit like ours for example. All I can say is that the volumes of our hull are forward just like the majority of other boats.

However, only small differences on specific points are likely to give you an edge. Take NZL84 and 92 that both look alike. There is no doubt in my mind that 92 went much further and is the superior boat.