MAT BIRD - Naval Architect/Software Developer

Mat Bird became a member of the Farr Yacht Design team in May 2004. He is a two-time America's Cup veteran, having worked on the 2003 challenge for Oracle BMW Racing in both Annapolis and New Zealand and the 2007 challenge for BMW Oracle Racing both in Annapolis and on-site for a year in Valencia, Spain. Mat's many duties as a member of the America's Cup design team included software development, naval architecture support, rating and measurement support, full scale performance analysis, onboard system development and potential flow cluster administration.

While working on the 2007 campaign from Annapolis, Mat was able to draw on his skills as both a naval architect and software developer. His hull design analysis duties included hull fairing and blending, VPP's, race modeling, hydrostatics, tank expansion, weight estimates and CFD. Mat's hull design software projects included the Farr Yacht Design's ACC specific Velocity Prediction Program, DesignTrak, a hull management and comparison database, RAGOO, an automated configuration tool, RMP3, an America's Cup race modeler and numerous other utilities such for batch parallel processing and CFD pre- and post-processing.

Once in Valencia, Mat's responsibilities expanded to utilize his unique skill set in a variety of disciplines. As Farr Yacht Design's only full-time onsite representative, he was the liason between the hull design group in Annapolis and the sailing and operations group in Valencia. In addition, he performed rating tradeoff analysis and assisted both in- and out-of-water hull measurements. He helped develop BMW Oracle's performance database and took an active role in using the database and associated tools for full-scale racing and testing performance analysis. Mat also developed the onboard helm displays used in 2007 and the first heads-up displays in the America's Cup in the 2003 campaign. Finally, Mat wrote a real time data acquisition and analysis package called SPAM used by the 2003 and 2007 weather teams.