No Excuse to Lose...

A feeling of invincibility is growing around USA 98. BMW Oracle seem very comfortable with their new boat, far more so than they ever were with USA 87. One of the lynchpins of the Americans’ enormous design team, the Argentinean maverick Juan Kouyoumdjian, says he’s very happy with the USA 98’s performance compared with the Kiwis’ boats for example.

Here’s a comment about NZL 92 from an interview with Juan K on Kimball Livingston’s blog. “At the risk of being wrong - we haven't sailed against them enough to really know - I'd say the boat lacks a touch of speed. That team can compensate with rigs, sails, sailing talent, but if you give that boat to any of the second-tier teams, you won't see them going any faster."

Tactician Gavin Brady is pretty impressed too: “What I like about 98 is the effort the builders put in to building it, she’s built down to the lightest tolerances ever seen, which maximises our stability.”

Brady believes this is the best boat he’s ever sailed on. “The first thing you do is you jump on a boat and work on minimising your weaknesses. It might have a really good fast mode or really high mode, but you don’t often get both. The nice thing with 98 is she seems to have both.

“My feeling is, if I was racing 98, and asked myself how I’d exploit her, well, she’s quite a formidable boat – she goes high, she goes low, she accelerates, she doesn’t stall. She’s an all-round nice boat. I’ve never seen it all come together before so nicely, the whole package, it’s four years of a lot of money, a lot of development, good people.”

The way Brady puts it, the boat is almost an extension of skipper Chris Dickson. Remember, Brady walked away from the team a couple of years ago because Dickson moved him off the wheel. Now that Brady’s back, he seems more than happy to operate in the tactician’s role while Dickson continues to steer.

“USA 98 has options, has modes, and one of the biggest features is Chris Dickson drives the boat extremely well. He’s very dialled in right now. I don’t think anyone is steering their boat as fast as Chris.

“He’s very confident with the boat. 98 is one thing, but having Chris Dickson drive it is the number one factor, it’s that package. He has a really good feel for the load on the rudder, that relationship is quite special. I’ve personally never been on a boat where we feel, we’re the only people that could screw it up for 98.”

Click here to listen to the whole MP3 interview with Brady in its entirety. It’s about 8 minutes.

Brady looks forward to speed testing with the Kiwis

Gavin Brady was on typically chatterbox form after today’s race against +39 Challenge. Brady is always good for a quote.

From what Brady said this afternoon at the media zone, he’s more interested in racing the Kiwis to be able to compare boatspeed rather than gaining that top spot in the Semi Finals, which would give the winner the option of picking their opponent.

Here’s a clip of what he said about the much anticipated race-off between the Kiwis and BMW Oracle: “I think it’s pretty important. Both teams are going to be full on in that last race, because we’ve only raced them once with our best equipment. We’ve raced them in flat water in 8 knots of wind. So it would be interesting to see some different performances in maybe more wind and choppier water.

“We haven’t seen the best of USA 98 yet, and I’m sure they feel the same. We need to see our mode against theirs. We’re going to have a couple of days off, and then we want to see how we mode our boat against the boat in the Semis.

"We’ll get into remoding our equipment, all our keels, masts and rudders. We’ve got different equipment we can pull off the shelf and put them on the boat. Hopefully we know exactly how to fight against them.”

Surely booking that top spot in the Semis is important too, though? "In a normal match race regatta, you feel like you have a massive advantage picking your opponent. Psychologically it would be nice to be able to pick your opponent, but really that’s just a feelgood factor. Whoever you don’t pick you’ll still end up racing them later.

"Race them sooner or later, it doesn’t really matter. In this regatta, coming 2nd in the Louis Vuitton is no different to coming 5th. We’ve got to race everyone at some stage."

Victory from the Jaws of Defeat

Victory Challenge seem to have been one of the underperformers of the Round Robins to date, not to mention their woeful catalogue of sail-handling errors in the fleet racing of Louis Vuitton Act 13. Yet here they are in 5th place on the leaderboard, so there is still much for the Swedes to play for.

How many more Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free cards will come their way though, such as the one handed to them by Shosholoza yesterday? The spinnaker pole breakage was another heartbreaking moment for the South Africans who, while they have great boatspeed and are sailing tactically very well, are being let down either by ripping spinnakers or snapping poles.

These can be the hardest defeats to take, as skipper Mark Sadler's comment indicates: "It is so disappointing, you can't imagine. Have a second spinnaker pole on board would be too heavy, so what can we do? We didn't make any mistakes at all during the race but we had some strange manoeuvres. All was going so well, we are fast and good. And then once again a material problem. When it happened I thought, 'Oh no, not again!' We have to keep going of course, but this is really hard to digest."

It all just seems to be slipping away for Shosholoza after such a strong start to the Round Robin campaign. A Semi Finals spot now looks a long way away, with Desafio Espanol displaying the sort of form that suggests they are not going to relinquish 4th spot without a big fight.

What the smaller teams must keep on telling themselves is that anything can happen in these conditions. Covering your opponent in such fickle breeze can be a fool's game, with the greater priority being to tap into the best power supply up the course. Gavin Brady's comment after BMW Oracle's race against Germany shows how weather-focused the American team was yesterday: "Our weather team told us there would be a pretty big right hand shift, and whoever was in front would probably win the race.

"So the mentality had to shift from it being a four-leg race to being a one-leg race, and we knew we had to maximise everything, make sure we had our best sail up, and win the start and the first windshift. So there was a little bit of heat on board for that first leg. But our weather team predicted it dead right – it became a one-way race course."

One of the most intriguing of today's matches looks the line-up between Victory and Luna Rossa. The Swedes have proven themselves well capable of giant-killing in the past, and Luna Rossa's starting has been off-key of late, so Victory have to believe they can win this confrontation - without the sort of luck that they relied on yesterday.

And then there is the prospect of Mascalzone Latino against Emirates Team New Zealand, two teams that for different reasons have their backs against the wall. For the Kiwis it is a matter of pride and team morale to keep Mascalzone at bay, while for the Italians it is a matter of staying in the hunt for the last four.