The ‘Pez de Abril’ navigator, data analyst for ‘INEOS Britannia’, is the only sailor in the international competition who is participating these days in Palma
PALMA, 4 Ago. (EUROPA PRESS) –
The Mallorcan Elvira Llabrés, data analyst for the ‘INEOS Britannia’ of the Copa América, is the only sailor in the international competition who is participating these days in the 41st edition of the Copa del Rey MAPFRE sailing, aboard the ‘Pez de April’.
Llabrés, a computer engineer, has taken advantage of her vacation to join the boat skippered by José María Meseguer, who won the previous series of the ClubSwan 42 class of the regatta that is taking place these days in the Bay of Palma.
There, it analyzes the data it receives on its tablet from a total of 15 sensors: boat speed, position with respect to the mark or wind intensity, among other parameters, to develop the boat’s strategy. Meanwhile, the rest of the crew involved in the fight for the so-called ‘Jug of the Hundred Guineas’ are enrolled in the dynamics of their respective teams.
“In the ‘INEOS Britannia’ I am in charge of doing calibrations in the water. When the ship goes sailing I go in a boat, and my role is to calibrate the wind, to see that all the sensors are taking all the data correctly”, indicated the sailor.
Llabrés, under the command of Ben Ainslie, the most successful athlete in the Olympic history of sailing -with one silver and four consecutive golds from 1996 to 2012-, highlighted the difficulty of working on the so-called ‘Formula 1 sailing’. “On an America’s Cup boat we have up to 600 sensors, instead of the 15 on the ‘Pez de Abril.’ And some of these sensors send data 10 or 50 times per second,” he said.
Next year, ‘INEOS Britannia’ faces the challenge of dethroning ‘Emirates Team New Zealand’ as champion in the Copa América in Barcelona, the city where the teams are already established. “The millions of data that we collect and analyze now in the sea trials have to be used to design the fastest boat. When we have built the final boat, the one that we will use in the America’s Cup, then we will have to analyze the data to discover the way faster to navigate it in the wind and sea conditions that we have at all times”, he said.
In this edition, they will also have access to reports on their rivals. “Before, each team spied on the rest within permitted limits, now it is the same organization that provides these reports to all the teams to democratize the information and equalize conditions,” he pointed out.
The Balearic sailor, who in the last 2021 edition was part of the ‘American Magic’, will face her sixth Copa América in 2014. “I am very lucky to have been able to unite her two passions, sailing and computing,” concluded Llabrés, who already worked in a different team in each of the editions.