Case Study: American Magic achieves data-driven yacht performance gains with Altair Knowledge Works

American Magic - Customer Case Study

The New York Yacht Club’s American Magic team, a historic America’s Cup contender, faced the twin challenges of strict design limits (one AC75 yacht, capped components, and no full‑scale physical testing) and an overwhelming volume of sensor and simulation data that was hard to translate into actionable design guidance. To remain competitive in the three‑year development cycle, the team needed rapid, reliable analytics to correlate simulation and on‑water results and pinpoint what actually drives performance.

Working with Altair, American Magic used Altair RapidMiner® and Knowledge Studio® (with HyperStudy® for optimization) to clean, visualize and model their data—moving from over 3,000 variables to 32 key predictors. The resulting predictive models and benchmarks identified primary contributors to boat speed, optimized yacht setups for straight‑line and maneuvers, and delivered actionable insights to designers, simulators and sailors, accelerated by close collaboration with Altair’s analytics experts.

American Magic

Andrea Mannarino

Manager of AI and Machine Learning