It’s pretty hard getting all the skippers on the same page on what we agree is safe and what is not.” “What I think is way too close, they think there’s plenty of room, and then it might be vice versa at times, as well. “It can be quite nerve-racking, if I’m being honest,” Tom Slingsby, the driver of the two-time-champion Australia SailGP team, said about sharing the course with eight other boats. “To build a new set of foils or a new boat, it can be up to half of a year, half of a season gone.” Spithill said he supported the new rules and was seeing situations where drivers were not attempting what he termed “Hail Mary” moves. “There’s only so much equipment,” Spithill said. “We know that, but I think it’s a deterrent, and we want that.”Ĭollisions can also jeopardize hard work and investment. “It’s still going to happen,” Coutts said about collisions. Before this season, SailGP included stricter rules aimed at discouraging contact and gave umpires increased discretion in awarding penalties. With closing speeds exceeding 90 knots, boat-on-boat contact can be severe, he said, referring to the speed at which boats sometimes approach one another. “We’re actually starting to probably break things that maybe weren’t getting broken in the past through the loads we’re putting through these boats now.” He added that newer code and software were important areas of advancement that were allowing teams to push the boats even harder. “The development is coming mainly around the human-machine interface,” Robertson said. The result is a level field that shifts evenly as the boats, and the racing, evolve. “That’s having to be managed pretty severely, and, to be honest, I don’t think we’ve quite got it right yet,” he said. “There’s a new level of fatigue within the team,” Robertson said, adding that it could be tough for them to travel home between events. Talk to the drivers, however, and crews said they were feeling the strain of the expanded schedule. “Once we get the number of events up,’” Coutts said, “once we expand the number of teams.” “Which is where we want to get to, because it’s hard to commercialize practice.”Īchieving this, he admitted, will take time, probably until the sixth season. “As we build our calendar out, like any other sport, in between races they will be looking for rest and just recover,” he said. He added that while SailGP was still in its growth phase, and while this season’s teams were desperate for time sailing and racing boats, this would change. “The more racing you have, the more competitive the teams are getting,” Coutts said. Russell Coutts, a five-time America’s Cup winner and SailGP’s chief executive, said that this kind of regularity was critical for building a fan base, increasing broadcast viewership and improving the quality of racing.
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