Trickledown… but a capital T

We constantly hear about the trickledown benefits of the vast sums spent on R&D at the top of the sport, yet in reality the benefits rarely trickle down very far; thinking here better grand prix sails, better grand prix winches and data logging systems… you soon get the picture. Iain Percy and his former Artemis America’s Cup team owner Torbjörn Törnqvist took a different approach, bypassing the ‘lower echelons’ of sailing and instead taking that expensively acquired aero and simulation IP and reinvesting it for purely commercial applications. Just three years later a world of quiet fossil-free maritime transportation is opening up ahead of them… as Tim Jeffery finds out

Afloat with Iain Percy; not in a Finn or Star in which he won his two gold and one silver Olympic medals with all the physical exertion those boats required. Instead, we are in a reasonably normal-looking cabin-RIB style workboat and about to experience something seemingly effortless. The shade of blue and the typeface used to spell out A-R-T-E-M-I-S are familiar from the America’s Cup, although the stylised bow and long arrow of Artemis the Hunter, the goddess famed for her unerring aim, is gone.