I Attended a Sail Grand Party, and It Was Great!
This past Saturday was an amazing day to be in New York City. We were among the lucky ones to be on board a spectator boat at SailGP New York.It was a beautiful day for sailing with a breeze of up to 20 knots in the puffs.
We arrived at Brookfield Place in the vicinity of the World Trade Center at about 4 pm. The spectator boat was waiting for us. Oh, it was actually an « adrenaline lounge hospitality boat. »
Service was impeccable and the DJ was great. Despite the booze on board, adrenaline was clearly in the air.
I did not pay much attention to what the MC was saying in the beginning, as I was busy chatting and taking some shots of Manhattan and spectators on the boardwalk.
I also took some pictures and videos of the F50s preparing for the first race, and it was pretty amazing as in several instances they came pretty close - say, 10 or 20 meters to our boat.
The 6 F50s were present, as the Great Britain boat, that capsized the day before prior to the racing, was repaired overnight.
A bit unexpectedly, the SailGP boats didn’t look particularly big when compared to the New York skyline. Yet, when they were getting close to the spectator boat, they really looked impressive.
I started realizing the experience was going to be special when a few minutes before the first race of the day, the music was cranked up.
Start Me Up by the Stones was the perfectly chosen song to set the stage for the day’s racing.
It’s then that Andy Green, the Master of Ceremony, who was mingling with the guests on the spectator boat, got into real action, and he did a fabulous job.
He commented on the first start that was soon to happen. But instead of opting for technical or strategic details, he commented with the party atmosphere in mind.
He took the pulse of the crowd, with some having one or maybe more drinks and others, like me, just teetotalling.
Yes, he commented with lots of expertise on the racing but he was also fully immersed in the party.
From the spectator boat, we could see the F50s well prior to the start, just after the start, after they rounded the downwind mark if they were choosing the right of the race course, and when finishing the race.
There were substantial parts of the race course, including the upwind marks, that we could not see properly, despite the pretty short size of the course.
What happened at each of the races was substantial separation between boats, and most of the time, there were some boats nearby to watch. When the boats were more distant, the show was clearly less interesting.
And even on the lower floor, few people paid attention to the large screens showing the racing, as visible on youtube and on TV. There were tablets to watch the race on the SailGP app, but few people on board took advantage of that.
And when there were no boats around, people kept chatting, while keeping an eye on the racing, it was more the general atmosphere that was truly enjoyed.
It felt a bit more like a grand party than a grand prix.
Predicting who the winner would be did not seem to be that high on the agenda of most people in attendance.
The party atmosphere and the show offered by the proximity of the boats were such that the actual racing was only part of what made the event truly remarkable.
For the next SailGP, I will not be on site, yet I will certainly watch the racing either on TV or on YouTube.
What I hope for is that Andy Green will MC again on the spectator boat, and that SailGP will have cameras onboard, to bring to everyone of us, who will watch online, that Sail Grand Party ambiance I so much enjoyed.
Huge Separation in Final Match Race
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| Screenshot from SailGP app towards the end of the last (match) race |
The rivalry between the two skippers was put forward in the SailGP pre-race media coverage.
USA decisively won one of the three races of the day, yet all eyes were on Australia and Japan.
At the final race, actually a match race between Australia and Japan, the beginning of the race was tight and there was even a contact.
Racing was tight during about half the race, with Australia in the lead during a certain period of time. But afterwards, Japan was able to grow a substantial and soon unsurmountable separation from Australia.
Victory went to Team Japan and Nathan Outteridge, and no-one disputed their superiority on the water during SailGP NY.
This final match race was short - 14 minutes in total - yet the separation at the finish was nearly 3 minutes! This is a 21% time differential.
3 minutes is a pretty long time to wait for the second to arrive, and few people actually paid attention to the finish line crossing by Australia.
My impression was that the final match race was a bit of an anti-climax, particularly the second part.
Big separation on the water is a problem with these high performance machines. Speed differentials can be huge.
You can have a boat at 3 knots on the race course, while at the same time, another one will be at over 30 knots.
In conditions like those in NY, everyone was mostly looking for pressure. Yet there was a big element of luck, as some boats got into more pressure while others got into more lulls.
When a boat is not foiling, speed is way slower compared to when foiling.
When watching that, I remembered a race I followed online at the 2018 Optimist Worlds, where the first 4 boats arrived, after one hour of extremely tight racing, within just 4 seconds of each other.
This was about a 0.1% time differential. It was a real photo finish, on the Optimist, after an hour of racing!
Such tight racing in the Optimist, when involving some of the best U16 sailing athletes in the world, can actually be more exciting, from a pure sailing perspective, than SailGP.
While the best SailGP teams will have the best average scores, and win overall, like Australia and Japan have done so far at the first 3 SailGP venues, each individual race has a big element of randomness into its results.
It’s unlikely that will substantially change. While several teams can clearly still up their game, Australia and Japan are already mastering the F50s extremely well, and yet, huge separation can occur between those two boats.
One may blame it on the venue and the unevenness of the winds, but it’s also very linked to the nature of the boats and the fact that foiling brings dramatically higher speeds as compared to when the boats don’t foil.
And this issue is to be expected with the new America’s Cup foiling mono-hulls too, even if the chosen venues may have less irregular winds.
Interesting times with these new platforms, but challenging times to make the racing as appealing as one would like it to be.
