 Strainstall have recently supplied two specially designed winch load pins to the America's Cup winning yacht, BMW Oracle. The winches were installed to measure the loads in the 223ft sails to enable the most efficient sail position to be calculated, resulting in optimal speed.
The yacht is one of the fastest and most technical advanced sailing machines the world has ever seen, and crucially uses a vertical wing instead of conventional sails. These rigid sails reputedly enabled BMW Oracle to travel up to three times the underlying wind speed, and exceed 40 knots (about 45 miles per hour). Larger than the wing of an Airbus A380 super-jumbo passenger jet, the rigid wing sail proved a decisive advantage and enabled BMW Oracle to win by a considerable margin.
In a recent article in the Financial Times about the America's Cup, Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle Corporation, commented on the fact that the yacht is at least 10 years ahead of the industry in terms of technology, and highlighted the in-built monitoring systems as a key innovation. | 
