The wave came back to Valencia.

This weekend, the Caponnetto Hueber team stepped away from our screens, simulations and projects to experience SailGP together, as the F50 fleet brought one of the world’s most spectacular sailing competitions to the Valencia waterfront.

Watching these boats race just metres from shore is a powerful reminder of how dramatically high-performance sailing has evolved. Speed, foiling, flight control, aerodynamics and hydrodynamics converge in machines capable of performances that would have seemed almost unimaginable only a few decades ago.

For a team whose daily work revolves around fluid dynamics, CFD, hydrodynamic optimisation and foiling technologies, watching that engineering perform on the water has a particular significance. Behind every acceleration, take-off and manoeuvre lies an extraordinary interaction between design, data, control and an understanding of the forces generated by air and water.

For some members of Caponnetto Hueber, however, seeing this generation of foiling catamarans racing in Valencia carried an additional meaning.

There is a technological thread connecting today’s F50s with a transformation in competitive sailing that began almost twenty years ago. Valencia played an important part in that story, and so did some of the people who would later become part of Caponnetto Hueber.

It is a story about experimentation, CFD, engineering and the moment when ideas that once seemed radical began changing the way racing yachts were designed and sailed.

We will be talking about that very soon.

For now, SailGP Valencia was an opportunity to enjoy the racing from a different perspective: not analysing results or evaluating simulations, but simply sharing time together outside the office and reconnecting with one of the things that brought many of us into this profession in the first place: a fascination with boats and the engineering behind them.

A good day for Team CH, and a remarkable weekend for sailing in Valencia.