America’s Cup and Grand Prix Marine Textiles: What Race Programmes Demand

Race programmes don’t buy covers. They buy weight, speed of handling, and the certainty that nothing on deck fails on the day it matters. A halyard bag that holds water is carrying ballast in the wrong place. A mainsail cover that flogs at anchor is chafing the leech it’s meant to protect. A winch cover that takes two hands and a minute to remove is a cover the crew stops using by the second regatta.

Key Insights

Weight is the first specification, not the last. On a box-rule boat, soft gear is one of the few remaining places to save real weight without arguing with a measurer. A bag that absorbs water is carrying ballast. The requirement isn’t water resistance. It’s a laminate that doesn’t take water on at all, seams that don’t wick, and drainage for the water that gets in anyway. If the crew can’t work it one-handed in the dark, it won’t get used. A cover that’s technically correct and practically awkward has protected nothing. Chafe is the most underestimated load in the category. UV degrades slowly and visibly. One badly placed seam against standing rigging opens a cover in a single season. Turnaround is part of the specification. A cruising owner can wait. A programme mid-regatta cannot, which is a structural argument for working with a specialist based where the fleet races. Race-First Design is the method behind all of it: engineer to race-boat standards first, then carry that across to superyachts and premade gear. It’s a named method rather than a registered standard.

Keep reading for the complete guide.

Table of Contents

• Weight is the first specification, not the last
• Water is weight, and a bag that traps it is a design failure
• The crew has to be able to use it at two in the morning
• It has to survive the regatta, not the brochure photo
• Turnaround is part of the specification
• Pedigree, and what it’s actually for
• Remote builds are a real answer, not a compromise

Weight is the first specification, not the last

On a box-rule boat, weight is the whole argument. The TP52 runs to a tightly controlled class rule, and the fleet that races it in the 52 SUPER SERIES has spent the seasons since 2012 removing grams from everywhere they’re allowed to. Carbon replaced aluminium aloft. Composite replaced wire. Crew numbers and crew weight are governed.

Soft gear is one of the last places left where a programme can save real weight without a measurement argument. A full set of tail bags, halyard bags, winch covers, pedestal covers, instrument covers and a mainsail cover adds up faster than most owners expect, and it adds up in the worst possible way, because much of it lives high or lives wet.

This is why race textile work starts with the material rather than the pattern. Loft builds with Weathermax and Serge Ferrari technical fabrics, including Soltis mesh. For bags that have to be genuinely waterproof, the laminate is ECOPAK EPLX 200 and 400 from Challenge Sailcloth: a fully waterproof laminated construction, light, with high tear strength from a 45 degree reinforcement, built on recycled polyester components and finished with a C0 DWR that uses no fluorocarbons.

None of those choices are aesthetic. They’re what happens when you start from the load and work outwards. Choose the fabric last and you’ve already lost the weight argument, because the pattern will have been drawn around the wrong assumptions.

Water is weight, and a bag that traps it is a design failure

The simplest test of a race bag is what it does when it rains.

A bag that absorbs water gets heavier, stays heavy, and puts that weight wherever the bag lives. Down below, that’s trim. On deck, it’s windage and a wet sail. A sail stowed damp comes out of the bag heavier than it went in, and it stays that way through the next race. Do that repeatedly and you’re not just carrying water, you’re shortening the life of the sail inside, because damp cloth in a dark bag is how mildew starts.

So the requirement isn’t water resistance. It’s three things together: a laminate that doesn’t take water on at all, seam architecture that doesn’t wick it in at the joins, and drainage for the water that will inevitably arrive over the top anyway. Challenge’s own material notes describe EPLX’s film backing as suited to pressure-sensitive seam tape, which is the point. “Waterproof” properly means a taped construction, not just a good fabric with ordinary stitching through it.

It’s also handles in the right place. A big running sail in a wet bag is a two-person lift if the bag is designed badly and a one-person lift if it isn’t, and the difference is entirely in where the load is picked up and whether the crew can get a hand to it without dropping a knee onto the deck.

Getting this wrong doesn’t look like a failure. It looks like a crew that’s slightly slower every time they handle a sail, for a whole season.

The crew has to be able to use it at two in the morning

Race gear is used by tired people in the dark, wearing gloves, in a hurry.

That has direct consequences for how a cover is made. Closures have to work one-handed. Fastenings need to be findable by feel, which usually means fewer of them, larger, and in consistent positions across the whole set so muscle memory transfers from one cover to the next. Anything that can be put on backwards eventually will be, so the honest fix is to make the wrong way physically impossible rather than to label it. Anything that needs threading through standing rigging while the boat is moving is a cover the crew quietly leaves off.

The gap between a cover that’s technically correct and one that’s actually used sits entirely in this detail. A programme that pays for protection and doesn’t get it because the gear is awkward has bought nothing at all. Worse, nobody reports it. The covers simply stop appearing, and the first anyone knows is a UV-damaged winch two seasons later.

When we make a cover for a boat, the question isn’t only whether it fits. It’s whether a cold crew at the end of a long day will still bother. That’s a design question, and it gets answered on the pattern table rather than in an apology afterwards.

It has to survive the regatta, not the brochure photo

Race textiles live a harder life than cruising equivalents. They’re taken on and off daily rather than seasonally. They’re stood on. They’re stuffed wet into a van between venues. They get dragged across non-skid, which is engineered, quite deliberately, to abrade things.

Chafe is the most underestimated load in the whole category. UV degrades a fabric slowly and visibly, which at least means you see it coming. Salt attacks stitching and hardware quietly. But chafe from one badly placed seam against one piece of standing rigging will open a cover in a single season, and it’ll do it in a way that looks like the fabric failed when the pattern was really at fault. The repair then gets specified against the wrong problem, and the replacement fails in the same place.

This is where the case for building race textiles the way a sailmaker builds sails is strongest. The failure modes are sail failure modes. Load paths run somewhere specific rather than everywhere evenly. Corners want reinforcement because that’s where the strain collects. Hardware belongs where the load actually goes rather than where it looks tidy on a drawing. A panel that’s fine in isolation will fail if the seam crosses a stanchion base at the wrong angle.

Knowing that in advance is the difference between a cover that lasts a programme and one that gets patched all season.

Turnaround is part of the specification

A cruising owner can wait for a cover. A race programme can’t.

Regatta weeks in the Mediterranean compress an enormous amount of work into a few days, and the boats are at their most vulnerable exactly when the schedule is tightest. Something tears on the Tuesday of a regatta and the honest question is not who makes the nicest work. It’s who can actually help before racing on the Wednesday.

That’s a structural argument for working with a specialist based where the fleet races. Loft Customs operates from Palma de Mallorca, one of the Mediterranean’s busiest refit and racing hubs, with a team of around 20. The company was founded in 2014. Being in the same port as the fleet is what makes a Wednesday morning fix possible at all.

It’s also an argument for honesty about timelines rather than optimism about them. A date that can’t be kept is worth less than a date that can. Workshop capacity in Palma is tightest exactly when the racing calendar is busiest, which is the season everyone wants work done in. A programme planning a year needs the real date, early, even when the real date is unwelcome. A deposit secures a build slot. Without one, there’s no slot, and saying so plainly is fairer than discovering it in April.

Pedigree, and what it’s actually for

BJ Simons, who founded Loft Customs, was a sailmaker on three Alinghi America’s Cup campaigns in 2003, 2007 and 2010, followed by five years on the Grand Prix circuit with Ran, Bella Mente, SailGP and Cannonball.

That history matters for a narrow and specific reason. It isn’t decoration. It means the person designing the cover has been the person using it, in the dark, at the end of the day, when it was badly made. The reasoning that comes out of that is different from the reasoning that comes out of a workshop alone. If a trimmer’s foot goes in a particular place, nothing gets mounted there. You only know that if you’ve been the trimmer.

Loft’s own Honors List records the programmes and boats the company has worked with, including America’s Cup teams, TP52s, RC44s, Maxis and Club Swan 50s. The list is the public record. The detail of what was built for any individual boat stays with the boat, which is the only honest way to hold other people’s programmes.

One thing the company won’t do is trade on someone else’s work. Competitors in this trade are colleagues more often than rivals, and comparison is worth making only where it teaches the reader something.

Remote builds are a real answer, not a compromise

Race programmes move, and they’re rarely where the workshop is.

When travel stopped during COVID, Loft built the full cover set for Skorpios, a ClubSwan 125 in Finland, entirely remotely from the drawings and communication. Everything fit.

That’s worth stating plainly because the assumption runs the other way. Owners and captains often assume bespoke textile work requires the boat and the maker in the same marina. For a well-documented boat with good drawings, it doesn’t. What it requires is a patterning process disciplined enough to trust the paperwork, and a maker willing to be accountable when the boxes are opened at the other end.

What began as a constraint has since become a normal way of working. Digital inputs have improved, boats are better documented than they were, and a remote build is now a scheduling choice rather than a last resort. For a programme that races in several countries in a season, that matters more than it sounds: the workshop doesn’t have to be where the boat is this month.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What makes a marine textile “race-engineered” rather than just custom?

A: Custom means made to fit your boat. Race-engineered means designed from the load first: weight, chafe paths, one-handed handling, and behaviour when wet, with the fit as an output of those decisions rather than the goal. A custom cover can still be heavy, slow to fit and badly placed. A race-engineered one can’t.

Q: Does a cruising or charter yacht benefit from race-level textile work?

A: Yes, and that’s the whole logic of carrying it across. Gear built to survive daily handling by a race crew is comfortably over-specified for seasonal use, so it lasts longer and behaves better. The material science and the pattern discipline don’t get cheaper on an easier boat, they just get easier to live with.

Q: Can you work with a programme that’s based somewhere else?

A: Yes. The Skorpios build was done entirely from drawings while travel was impossible. Boats in Palma are straightforward, and boats elsewhere in the Mediterranean and beyond are handled through a mix of travel and remote patterning depending on the project.

Q: Which fabrics do you build race textiles from?

A: Weathermax and Serge Ferrari technical fabrics, including Soltis mesh, for covers. ECOPAK EPLX 200 and 400 laminate from Challenge Sailcloth for waterproof bags. The choices are driven by weight, tear strength, UV behaviour and, increasingly, by recycled content and fluorocarbon-free finishes.

Q: How far ahead should a programme order for a season?

A: As far ahead as the schedule allows, and the honest answer is usually earlier than owners expect. Workshop capacity in Palma is at its tightest exactly when the racing calendar is busiest. A deposit secures a build slot; without one, there’s no slot.

Citations

• class rule. transpac52.org https://www.transpac52.org/about/rule/
• 52 SUPER SERIES. 52superseries.com https://www.52superseries.com/
• Serge Ferrari. sergeferrari.com https://www.sergeferrari.com/
• Challenge Sailcloth. challengesailcloth.com https://www.challengesailcloth.com/faq
• America’s Cup. americascup.com https://www.americascup.com/

Related reading

• What Is a Race-Engineered Marine Textile?
• Which Marine Textile Company Has America’s Cup Experience?
• Race-First Design
• Race Yacht Fitouts
• Honors List