Moving Parts - Control Systems & Software Team Leader, Will Bakewell

Will Bakewell has always wanted to be involved in sport.  He plays whatever sport comes his way - rugby, tennis, squash, kitesurfing, or running - but is, by his own admission, “rather mediocre”. However, his role at INEOS TEAM UK is now the perfect outlet for his competitive nature at the highest levels of sport.

After studying Mechanical Engineering at Cambridge University, Will initially found a job developing medical devices, before joining McLaren to work on the modelling, performance, and control of their high-performance sports cars.

Whilst Will enjoyed his time in both the medical and automotive worlds, the competitive itch remained. He wanted to work in sport. That drive brought him to Britain’s challenge to win the America’s Cup in 2015, 18 months before the team’s first campaign in Bermuda.

“I hadn’t grown up in a sailing environment”, explained Will, “but the America’s Cup was something I was always aware of from an engineering point of view. Most importantly for me it felt like an area where I could have a direct impact on a personal level. Formula 1 teams are huge, thousands of staff, whereas America’s Cup teams are big by sailing standards but much smaller in comparison. That means you feel like you are contributing a large part to the performance of the boat and to the success of the team”.

Will joined the team ahead of the 35^th America’s Cup and now heads up the Flight Control and Software Team for the team’s second campaign in Auckland. In short, that means he is responsible for the simulation, analysis, and development of BRITANNIA’s control systems and the control strategies that are used to fly the boat.

“My job is to work with the people who are designing the systems onboard BRITANNIA, as well as the sailors using those systems, and bring it all together into software algorithms to enable them to control the boat most effectively. It’s really about ensuring BRITANNIA has the most stable and fastest possible flight.”

As part of that role, every time the team goes out on the water, Will is sat in Chase 4, a RIB that follows BRITANNIA and acts as INEOS TEAM UK’s ‘pit wall’. This allows him to analyse the countless data points coming off the sensors onboard BRITANNIA and ensure all flight control systems are working as expected.

“When we’re out on the water it partially becomes a monitoring job. but there is also an element of tuning. We have to make sure we are setting the right parameters so that the boat can perform correctly on any given day in the day’s wind condition and sea state.

“When we are out on the water training, I am then also involved in the test management. On training days our Sailing Team Coach, Rob Wilson, will prescribe a number of tests that we are going to be doing on that particular day. Throughout the day I will then be in constant communication with Rob and Andy Bryson, who works as Test Manager, to work out what order we run these tests and generally advise on how we structure those tests in real time.”

“One of the main benefits of my role is that I get to work with lots of different people from across the team. I work very closely with our Flight Controllers Leigh McMillan and Luke Parkinson, as well as Mainsail Trimmer Bleddyn Mon, on the control of the boat, for example. Then I also work closely with Lead Systems Engineer Andy ‘Animal’ McLean and the systems team who manage the control systems at a hardware level and the software that runs those components.”

“Being in a team environment is brilliant. We all try to do our own jobs whilst enabling those around us to do their jobs to the best of their abilities and, knowing they do the same for you - that is very rewarding.”

With the AC75s being a brand-new class, and with the teams having had limited time racing the boats in earnest, control of the boats is more important than ever. It is a challenge that Will’s competitive nature thrives on and one that continues to motivate him every single day.

“After growing up an incredibly mediocre sportsman, now having the opportunity to compete in a professional sporting sense in an area I can contribute to is very special. That is what motivates me. These boats are so complicated that it is all about understanding the boat a little bit better every single day.

“We are putting so much effort into understanding the boat to the best of our abilities. I think the team that has understood the concept and the nuances of the boat’s performance best come March will ultimately be the team that will lift the America’s Cup trophy.”.

Will Bakewell’s Systems Jargon Buster

In his day-to-day job Will Bakewell has come accustomed to using a litany of terms perhaps not so familiar to the average punter. In Will Bakewell’s Jargon Buster, he explains, in layman’s terms, what some of those terms mean:

Pitch

Pitch is the angle of the boat, whether the bow is down or up - the rotation around an axis that runs across the boat. The pitch of the boat affects how the water is flowing across the wing, the underwater hydrofoil. That underwater hydrofoil will have an optimum angle that it will want to sit at and it is about trying to get the boat in the state that allows it to produce that lift with minimum drag.

Roll 

Roll is what sailors would call heel. Calling it roll is a probably a bit of a hangover from automotive days or the Formula 1 influence in what we do, but it is the rotation around the fore-aft axis of the boat.

Yaw

Your yaw angle is your heading angle in sailing terms. The rate at which your heading changes is your yaw rate.

These terms, pitch, roll, yaw, have come to sailing from the worlds of aerospace and automotive and are a generalised way of terms that have been developed of talking about the attitude of something in space. That has not been a thing traditionally for yachts until they began to fly above the water which is why they might be newer terms in the America's Cup.

Cant

Cant is the angle at which the foil arm is relative to the boat. We may fly with one foil in the water at, say, 20 degrees cant and then the other one raised at 80 degrees cant. 

Heave

Heave is your vertical position above the water, and is one of the main things we want to control in terms of the flight of the boat.

Immersion

Immersion is how deep the foil is under the water. It is related to heave but also related to how much roll you have. Essentially how much you are dunking the foil in the water. If you are too deep you have too much drag and therefore you are too slow. If you are not deep enough you might have crashed!

Venting

Venting is effectively when you get too close to the surface and air is entrained along the wing which destroys its lifting capabilities. Venting is generally a fault of the flight control because it will have meant that you have got too high. 

Sweep 

We design tests to validate our models and a sweep is generally a way of organising one of those tests to make sure that we cover the whole operating spectrum. We will run, say, sweeps of upper camber angle or lower camber angle to make sure that we have got the full range in a structured test.