America's Cup Team NZ's one certainty ahead of America's Cup match

By Christopher Reive

When the America’s Cup match begins in Barcelona next weekend, Team New Zealand know they will have a true challenge on their hands.

Over the past week, British crew Ineos Britannia and Italians Luna Rossa Prada Pirelli have been engaged in a tight battle in the Louis Vuitton Cup final, the winner moving on to the Cup match.

It has been closely contested through 10 races so far, with Ineos Britannia leading 6-4 after picking up two wins on the trot on Thursday morning and now needing just one more to take it out.

It has been a distinctly different final series to that of the 36th edition of the Cup in Auckland in 2021. Contested between the same teams, Luna Rossa cruised to a 7-1 win before being beaten 7-3 by Team NZ in the Cup match.

Speaking to the Herald from Barcelona, Team NZ port helmsman Nathan Outteridge said one thing was certain when they return to racing next week, regardless of who they were up against.

“We’re going to have a good challenger, one way or another. They’re going to be race-hardened,” Outteridge said.

“Jimmy Spithill’s always ice-cool and doesn’t get flustered at all, Francesco Bruni wears his heart on his sleeve. Those two haven’t changed at all and there’s a great balance between the two of them. Then with Dylan [Fletcher] and Ben [Ainslie] driving the British boat, they push for it. They’re very aggressive in the pre-start, they like to do the extra manoeuvres and try to create a situation they can win from.

“We’ve been studying both teams very closely. Ultimately, we’re only going to get to race one of them so we just need to be prepared for both and we’ve got different departments within our team doing analysis of their performance and their starting strategy. Come this weekend when it’s all over, we’ll be deep into the data to try to understand how we best prepare for the challenger.”

Team NZ have not raced since the round-robin stage of the regatta ended in early September. Since then, they have been focused on improving their performance – through upgrades and tweaks to the boat as well as sailing execution – but have been keeping a watchful eye on their potential challengers.

Through the round-robins, Team NZ had put some of their focus on executing in the pre-start as well as gauging how they matched up against other teams on boat speed and performance.

The start has been a particularly important aspect of races in this regatta, with the team leading at the first gate usually going on to win the race.

The sailing performance in 2021 was an area Team NZ were self-critical of, despite comfortably locking the Auld Mug away again, and Outteridge, who wasn’t part of the team in 2021, said the improvements in that area were clear during the round-robins.

“If you just look back to the last Cup, probably a lot of people didn’t expect to realise how important the start was. You know, typically a faster boat will win the race, and even if you don’t nail the start, you’ll be able to make the pass somewhere around the course.

“What’s become quite apparent in these boats is that, particularly in the light winds, the boats create such a huge wind shadow with the big sail area that it’s actually hard to get past another boat, even if it’s slower.

“We were pretty happy with how we started in the round-robins. Our success rate in the start was pretty high, which we were very happy with. "

Over the next week, Team NZ will finish their preparations, with the Cup match getting under way on October 13 (NZ time).

The best-of-13 series will be a culmination of almost four years of work for the team, who Outteridge believes will be coming in hot in their return to racing.

“I feel like we’re pretty much ready to go. We always targeted this week as our final week of upgrades and bits and pieces. We’ve signed everything off that we want, and we’ve just got to keep getting out there and staying sharp,” he said.

“The thing that happens really easily is if you take three or four days off the water, you end up coming back quite rusty so we’ve got a pretty good schedule between now and when we start where we’re sailing a couple of days, taking a couple of days off, then we’ll try to build that intensity coming into the event.

“It’s not long to go now. We need to make sure we’re ready in all departments. It feels like we’re in a good space, but we’ve got to be ready for all sorts of curveballs to be thrown our way.”

This article was first published on nzherald.co.nz and is republished here with permission