By Alexander Smith
BARCELONA, Spain (Reuters) – America’s Cup crews in Barcelona have been busy building Lego models of New Zealand’s AC75, with even British skipper Ben Ainslie finding time to piece one together with his young son.
New Zealand are holders of the America’s Cup and being challenged for the “Auld Mug” by a British team led by Ainslie, who has made it his mission to “bring the Cup home” for the first time in its 173-year-history.
Ainslie’s wife Georgie pictured the 47-year-old sailor and his son puzzling over the Lego Technic version of the Kiwi boat, with the actual AC75 having been shrouded in secrecy, in an Instagram post.
“That didn’t take long. These two already trying to figure out some Kiwi secrets by building their Lego boat. Why don’t we have a Lego boat @benainslie?” she said in last week’s post.
Other British supporters responded online by calling on Lego to produce a model of “Britannia”.
Several members of another America’s Cup team, which did not make it through to the final, said they had bought the Lego kit, which is on sale in official stores in Barcelona, where the Kiwis lead Britain 4-2 in the first-to-seven series.
One said they had spent eight hours assembling the Lego bricks to build the New Zealand boat, which includes many of the intricate features of the monohull and its high-tech foils and is on sale for 140 euros ($152).
FAN ENGAGEMENT
Simon Munro, who runs the six America’s Cup merchandise shops and its online store, said his company had sold “a few thousand” of the kits in addition to those sold by Lego itself.
“The day that we released it on online, Team New Zealand posted about it and they actually said it was one of the best fan engagement posts they’ve ever done,” said Munro.
It took about 18 months of development from when the group responsible for merchandise began talking to Lego to when the set was released, Munro said, adding that it had involved meetings between designers from the team and Lego.
The Danish company declined to comment when asked by Reuters how many of the AC75 sets it had sold, where most sales were being made or if it had been asked to make a British version.
Munro said he too had built the model, which is targeted at adults, adding: “I went into the team base and said ‘It took me six hours’ and they said ‘ah, the record is four'”.
“I think that was Dan Bernasconi, so he has some insight,” said Munro, referring to New Zealand’s technical director and one of the designers of their AC75 “Taihoro”.
“I would definitely recommend any team to do it, because its obviously good advertising … the problem is could you convince Lego to do another one if the boat stays the same?” he added.
($1 = 0.9216 euros)
(Reporting by Alexander Smith; Editing by Ken Ferris)
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