Youth AC puts on a show

Luna Rossa Prada Pirelli's team won the UniCredit Youth America's Cup after a highly absorbing series comprising 12 international teams racing the one-design AC40s off Barcelona.

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The AC40s were something of an ambitious experiment for this 37th America's Cup - being used for the Youth and Women's America's Cups this autumn, having already earned their keep as the one-design class raced at the first two Preliminary Events by the senior teams earlier in the cycle, and as a test platform for teams to trial components such as foil designs.

But the combination of this young generation of speed-foiling sailors, together with mini Cup boats, have already emerged as key positives from the AC37 (and at the time of going to press, we haven't even seen the AC40s in action for the first ever Women's America's Cup).

Following the Round Robin stages of the Louis Vuitton challenger series in the AC75s, the AC40s seemed like the real stock car-style racers. The UniCredit Youth America's Cup created prime spectator viewing, particularly as it mostly involved fleet racing on the same tight course. Watching the next generation of sailing hotshots rip these boats around at 30-40 knots, with six boats at a time on a compact boundary track, proved to make for adrenaline-spiked entertainment gold.