Great Britain Sail Grand Prix: New Zealand victorious, Australia's penalty, and spectators invade

New York Times

20-07-2025

After dominating the first day of the Great Britain Sail Grand Prix in Portsmouth, the British team couldn't quite seal victory in front of the home crowds as Pete Burling and the Black Foils from New Zealand stole their thunder in the three-boat final on Sunday.
But Dylan Fletcher's boat came a close second across the finish line for a solid British result.
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Sebastian Schneiter might have been disappointed to have lost the early advantage out of the start, but it was the first time the Swiss team had fought their way to a SailGP three-boat final, and Schneiter was upbeat about the team's clear improvements.
It was a windier day on the Solent, a narrow strait between the English south coast and the Isle of Wight, and the French were back up and running on day two of the close-to-shore competition after their wing sail snapped on Saturday. There was controversy, too, as the sixth fleet race was suspended because a spectator boat had invaded the course.
All 12 teams blasting around an incredibly tight course for the day's three fleet races meant there was hardly time for anyone to catch their breath.
The spectator fleet was behaving itself on the western boundary of the course, with close to a hundred cruising yachts and other craft all in a neat, orderly line behind the marshal boats. All except one that, just before the start of Race 6, drifted into the course area just as the F50 catamarans were jostling for position in the final two minutes before the start, and forced a restart.
Hannah Mills, Britain's double Olympic Champion and strategist — the sailor who plots a weaving path through the high-speed traffic for the driver steering the F50 — wasn't entirely sure what had happened in all the confusion.
'Something to do with a boat in the start box,' Mills said. 'Which is not a great place for a small yacht to be when there are 12 F50s coming in, all screaming at them. So yeah, it was the right move by the race management to just postpone the start and do it again.'
Australian driver Tom Slingsby thought the problem was more the number of course marshals trying to shepherd the stray boat back into the flock.
'I think more of the problem (than the yacht) was five police boats which surrounded him,' Slingsby said. 'Yeah, we had an incident, only just avoided the police boat, so that wasn't really helping out the situation.'
There were a lot of breakdowns across the weekend, and a lot of technical problems besetting the fleet — some self-inflicted, some not.
So it felt appropriate that DJ Pete Tong was on the decks to play the spectators out of the 10,000-seater temporary stadium at the end of an entertaining but often scrappy and confusing day.
The U.S. team struggled to get up and running until the last fleet race of the afternoon, suffering from an up/down cylinder failure in the starboard daggerboard case. Unlike in Formula One, where the teams are responsible for the smooth running and maintenance of their own cars, all the equipment in SailGP is centrally managed, so Taylor Canfield's crew are bound to have questions about the reliability of their boat.
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There was a similar problem for the British, as driver Dylan Fletcher explained to The Athletic: 'We had an issue with our port (left-hand side) board, which wasn't functioning or lifting up in the first race. We fixed it for the second race.
'Then we had the same issue again, but luckily they fixed it and we missed the start of the third race but still managed to get around. And it was working and all good for the final.'
Germany took themselves out of the game when Erik Heil's T-foil rudder snagged an anchor line as they were foiling past the windward turning mark off course. Spain suffered a breakdown, too, after riding too high and falling off the foils. After winning back-to-back events in San Francisco and New York, Diego Botin's crew never found their rhythm on the choppy waters of the Solent.
Still, it wasn't all bad news. Overnight, the SailGP tech team had managed to get France's broken wingsail fixed after it snapped before Saturday's racing had even begun.
On Sunday, Quentin Delapierre's crew got back into their groove in time to win the restarted fleet Race 6 and finish second in the seventh and final fleet race.
The usually high-flying and fast-starting Australians just couldn't bring their A-game to Portsmouth. However, after starting last in Sunday's first fleet race, the Aussies turned on the afterburners to scythe their way through the pack to salvage a miraculous fourth place across the finish line.
Despite not quite being at their best, it looked like Slingsby might yet be able to elbow his way past the Swiss for that third spot in the final.
But in fleet Race 6, he received an expensive penalty in a complicated four-boat situation which involved Canada, Denmark, Britain and Australia. Speaking more than an hour after the incident, Slingsby was perplexed at how the remote umpires — based in London — had penalized his team rather than Britain.
'I'm sort of shocked at how we got the penalty,' Slingsby said. 'The British didn't try to avoid the two starboard tackers and we've got to avoid the British boat, which we did clearly.
'It's not our fault, and we lost probably eight or nine positions because we had to get behind Canada, who were stopped at the bottom of the course. It's frustrating because obviously we would have been in the final.'
SailGP moves to Sassnitz on the Baltic coast of Germany for racing on August 16 and 17.