Can Ben Ainslie and Jim Ratcliffe win the America’s Cup for Britain?

“We probably had more gin and tonics than we should have,” says Sir Jim Ratcliffe, chairman and CEO of the chemicals giant Ineos, as he looks back on his first meeting with the five-time Olympic medallist sailor Sir Ben Ainslie. It was in 2018 when a mutual friend, the yacht broker Chris Cecil-Wright, introduced the pair at the private members’ club 5 Hertford Street. “It wasn’t an approach really, just a drink,” says Ratcliffe. “And the conversation naturally drifted onto the America’s Cup.”  

He would later joke that it was “the most expensive gin and tonic in history”, after he agreed to back Ainslie’s second campaign to win the coveted Cup, for a reported £110mn. Ainslie had been explaining how the team was at the time backed by a consortium. “I might have said as a throwaway line, if we did get involved, we’d have to do the whole thing rather than sit in a committee,” Ratcliffe recalls. “We’re not very good committee people.”

Ineos Team UK (now Ineos Britannia) was launched to campaign for the 36th America’s Cup in Auckland, New Zealand in 2021. Despite a disappointing start, which saw them place last in the preliminary regatta, they came top in the round robins and challenged Luna Rossa in the Prada Cup final for the honour of challenging Emirates New Zealand in the America’s Cup final. They lost, but it was the furthest a British team had come since 1964.

For Ratcliffe, 71, the mission is a question of national pride. “It’s the oldest sporting trophy, and a trophy we’ve never won. Sailing is part of the British DNA. We did rule those waves for a few centuries, but we’ve never won the America’s Cup. It would be quite a thing.”

We were three blokes in our 60s who liked sport – why not?

Ainslie is Britain’s most successful Olympic sailor, winning four golds and a silver between Atlanta 1996 and London 2012, but the America’s Cup has been an ambition since he first set eyes on competing yachts while sailing as a seven-year-old in Falmouth harbour: “I was in total awe of the majesty of these boats, and hooked from then on.” He was part of the winning American team, Oracle USA, for the 34th Cup in 2013 but, like Ratcliffe, he is spurred by the national challenge “of having never won it”. 

Ratcliffe grew up in Failsworth, Lancashire, the son of a joiner who went on to run a factory making laboratory furniture. He studied chemical engineering at Birmingham University, did an MBA at London Business School in 1980, then worked for Esso before going into private equity. He formed Ineos and began to buy up assets from BP and ICI; by 2007 he had petrochemical plants and refineries from Scotland and mainland Europe to Canada. The 2023 Sunday Times Rich List estimated Ratcliffe’s net worth at around £29.7bn, making him the second most wealthy individual in the UK at the time.

He is passionate about sport and adventure. He’s an avid runner, once ran and cycled 600km across Namibia, has climbed the Matterhorn and trekked to the Poles. He says Ineos’s move into sports was a logical progression of that interest – today the company’s portfolio includes Formula One, cycling, Eliud Kipchoge’s sub-2:00 marathon record and now Manchester United. The Qatari businessman Sheikh Jassim bin Hamad Al Thani had initially hoped to acquire the football club outright, but withdrew from bidding in October, leaving Ratcliffe to buy a 27.7 per cent minority shareholding for a reported £1.25bn. He is set to invest a further $100mn by the end of the year, but would not be drawn on details of the negotiations or future plans for the club.

“There were three of us running Ineos, all in our 60s,” says Ratcliffe, “We’d all been very successful, we’d all worked for a long time, we’re all from the north of England. We all generally liked sport, so why not? It was a bit of fun and a challenge. I think most normal blokes like sport. I know some people go off in different directions, they might like opera or classical music, but the majority enjoy sport.” 

Ratcliffe and Ainslie meet every four to six weeks in one of the Ineos offices, depending on where Ratcliffe is. Today it is the Monaco office, which occupies a couple of floors of a building less than 200m from the Casino de Monte Carlo. Inside it’s all motor racing and Hollywood glamour; a photo of Steve McQueen looms large by the coffee bar; vintage steering wheels and retro prints of Monaco and Le Mans line the walls; miniature Grenadiers (the name of the pub in London where Ratcliffe came up with his idea of making his own version of a Land Rover Defender) sit on a wooden bookshelf: the windows offer wide views over the harbour. But the largest presence is Ratcliffe himself, whose lean 6ft 4in frame stands over everyone else, Ainslie included.

The secret to their working relationship is that Ratcliffe treats Ainslie like any other of his business interests. “We have board meetings for all our businesses, so we don’t treat sailing any differently to one of the chemical businesses or other sports teams,” says Ratcliffe. Ainslie admits he can’t afford to arrive unprepared. “You can’t turn up here and not know if there’s an issue, have analysed it and understood it because Jim has this knack of understanding what the core of an issue is and trying to get to the bottom of it.” 

“Everything is a learning,” continues Ratcliffe of the decision-making process. “You just sort of home in on it and try to figure out why it’s gone wrong and what we can do to get it back on track. It’s very much consensus driven. There’s no point being hysterical and screaming death. That doesn’t really help. We’ve always said, if there’s any bad news we need to know today. Good news can wait.” 

It’s an insane piece of technology – a wonder of science

Ratcliffe likens it to F1, where the teams are all engaged in a high-stakes R&D battle to produce a winning car each season. “We’re in a much better place than we were in the previous America’s Cup but, as ever with these things, you don’t know until you actually see all the boats on the water.” Uniquely, Ainslie and the crew can tap into the expertise of the Ineos Mercedes-AMG Petronas F1 team – Ineos is a one-third equal shareholder. “We are the first team that have really engaged heavily with the F1 industry,” says Ratcliffe. It’s a mine of expertise they can call upon. While the Ineos America’s Cup team is about 200, the Mercedes F1 team, based in Brackley, is 1,000 strong. “There’s a whole host of experts across the group that we can tap into. It’s a huge partnership,” says Ainslie.

“There are lots of similarities between F1 and the America’s Cup,” adds Ratcliffe. “They’re carbon-fibre structures, they’ve both got foils or wings. The calculations are just the same – one’s working in water, one’s working in air, but it’s just a fluid with a different density.”

Besides the designers there’s also the performance expertise of the cycling team Ineos Grenadiers they can dial into. “There’s a lot of expertise that we can understand how to get better performance from our athletes, from sports psychology to physio, you name it,” adds Ainslie. The collaboration has seen the cyclors join the likes of Geraint Thomas and the rest of the Ineos Grenadiers cycling squad on training camps in Mallorca. Although they’re more likely to come from rowing than cycling – Matt Gotrel won a rowing gold in Rio – they were just about able to keep up. “A half-decent cyclist will get up the Sa Calobra climb in 45 minutes but these cyclors are getting there in 30,” says Ratcliffe. 

The official boat design, meanwhile, the AC75, bears as much resemblance to a traditional “displacement” yacht as Top Gun: Maverick’s Mach-10 Darkstar does to the Wright brothers’ biplane. “It’s an insane piece of technology, a wonder of modern science,” enthuses Ratcliffe.  

In 2013 hydrofoils were first introduced into America’s Cup yacht design. Acting like an underwater wing, they lift the boat out of the water, freeing it from all resistance. “It’s more like being a pilot these days,” says Ainslie. “There’s a huge amount of energy in these boats,” adds Ratcliffe. “It’s 10 storeys high, 25m long, it travels up to 100kmph and sails on a foil the size of a coffee table. It’s a disaster if you crash them.” Then, in a friendly warning shot across the bow of his skipper, he reminds Ainslie he only has one of them to play with. 

Serious crashes are rare, but in 2013 British sailor Andrew “Bart” Simpson died when the catamaran Artemis capsized, prompting a slew of safety reviews. “We take safety very seriously,” adds Ainslie. Each crew member wears a helmet, carries oxygen and a knife and there are spare air canisters in the cockpit.

The main challenge is getting to the starting line at all. And even then the America’s Cup is brutally unforgiving. First, Ineos Britannia must win the challengers’ regatta just to earn the right to take on the Cup holder, Emirates Team New Zealand. Only then will the real battle begin. The preliminary round takes place in Barcelona in late August, with the final, the Louis Vuitton America’s Cup Match, taking place from 12 to 27 October. 

“The next six months are obviously crucial. It’s hard work but it’s what you live for,” says Ainslie. For Ratcliffe, all eyes are on the prize – and there’s only one in this game. “Queen Victoria asked who came second in 1851 and was told, ‘There’s no second, Ma’am, you know,’” he says. “We wouldn’t be here if we didn’t think winning was possible. There’s no point – no interest – in coming second.”