NEW YORK :SailGP teams will shake off the rust in New York this weekend, as the global racing championship gets back into action after a wingsail defect forced a brief hiatus with the cancellation of May’s Rio event.
Organisers identified the defect after the Australian boat’s wing collapsed in San Francisco in March and carried out repair and upgrade work to remedy the issue on the F50 fleet in time for the highly anticipated New York competition.
“We had almost two months of learning to take from the previous events,” said Brazil’s twice Olympic champion Martine Grael, SailGP’s first-ever female driver.
“We have a lot of changes in our sailing – there are almost too many changes and we know you can only handle a few changes at a time. We’re focusing to see what we can adapt here.”
The recently added Brazil team hope to move up the standings from 10th as the action kicks off on Saturday at 1 p.m. ET (1700 GMT), two and a half hours earlier than planned due to inclement weather.
The three-times champions Australia, who hold just a one-point advantage over Britain in the standings, want to impress after making headlines off the water, with new A-List co-owners Hugh Jackman and Ryan Reynolds announced this week.
The great equaliser between the celebrity-fronted top dogs and the up-and-comers has been the competition’s tech-first approach to sailing, with each of the vessels equipped with 125 sensors continuously feeding data.
“We give the data to everybody,” SailGP’s Chief Technology Officer Warren Jones told Reuters. “Top teams hate it, but the newer teams love it.”
Jones was able to build the robust analytics operation from “a blank sheet of paper” by cherry-picking from billionaire co-founder Larry Ellison’s Oracle capabilities.
The hope is that the data points broadcast across the competition can help transform the next generation of fans – newcomers and diehards alike.
“There are the basics – you need to know how fast people are going because then it adds the jeopardy of what’s going on,” said Jones.
“Then there’s people out there who want to know how many tacks they’ve done and what the tack is compared to the last tack – we can rate that.”
