Former helmsman Dean Barker has vowed today that he will seek revenge on his former teammates, and single-handedly construct a “giant death yacht” with which he will defeat Team New Zealand and “take over the world.”

Barker, who was this week publicly dumped from New Zealand’s competitive moneyboat team, said that, prior to his axing, he had warned Team New Zealand manager Grant Dalton that, “if he were to strike me off now, I would become far more powerful than he could possibly imagine.”

Barker is now promising to follow through on that threat, by competing in the next America’s Cup entirely by himself, in a yacht designed to “shatter the souls of men.”

“Would you say, you’re… bitter?” a thoughtful John Campbell asked Barker in an exclusive interview last night on Campbell Live.

“Oh yes,” replied Barker, softly. “Very.”

“I’m mad,” he added, “but uh, I don’t need to tell them that.”

He shook his head. “They know what’s coming.”

Barker told Campbell that, while plans were not yet finalised, he believed his yacht would be a state-of-the-art, “unprecedently deadly” boat.

“It will be very sophisticated,” he said, a grin beginning to creep across his face. “It will have cannons, lasers, sort of, flamethrowers, and some whirly bits.”

He smiled wider. “I can’t lose, really.”

Barker said that he would not need a crew, as the boat would largely operate itself, fuelled by his life energy.

“There’s going to be a sort of, nexus at the centre of the ship, where I will place my own body,” he explained. “At this point, I will cease to be Dean Barker. I will, in fact, have become part of the yacht itself.”

Asked what he would use to construct the boat, he replied “Pure hatred.”

Some questions have already been raised about whether Barker’s design would fit within the strict rules of the America’s Cup, but officials say that, at least on paper, there appears to be nothing that would explicitly forbid lasers, whirly bits or “any machines of death.”

Some of Barker’s friends have privately told media they are worried that the loss of his job has “hit him hard,” and that he may be “slightly unhinged.”

But his wife, Mandy, says that “Dean is fine,” and that his obsession with building an elaborate contraption of death for the sole purpose of revenge is just because “he loves boats so much.”