Artemis looking sharp for Perth debut

Dangerous though it may be to draw too many conclusions from practice racing, Sweden’s new Artemis SailGP team were looking match-fit on Friday afternoon ahead of their series debut in Perth this weekend. 

Nathan Outteridge and the rest of the crew looked “dialled in”, to borrow the phrase used by my co-pilot at The Foil, Freddie Carr. 

Straight after the press conference, I caught up with Nathan Outteridge and asked Sweden’s driver if he shared Russell Coutts’s prediction that they’d make the podium this weekend. 

Nathan had a pretty fun take on why Russell said what he said... “That’s just Russell trying to put pressure on us, you know, and he's great at doing that. But we know we've got really good people within the team. Andy [Maloney] is by far, one of the best flight controllers in the fleet. You look at the data throughout the last few seasons and he's the benchmark alongside Parko [Luke Parkinson] and Jason [Waterhouse]. They're the top three in the fleet.”

I also got Nathan’s reaction on how he’s going to run a SailGP campaign alongside an America’s Cup campaign as skipper of Emirates Team New Zealand. Tricky balancing act, but Nathan puts a good spin on it.

“It’s pretty clear that all the top sailors are racing in SailGP and for me to stay at the top of my game. It's important to keep racing. So it actually was a pretty easy conversation to have [with Grant Dalton, ETNZ boss] and you know it's really awesome that I'm back racing.”

As we reported yesterday, the ‘Los Gallos’ Spanish team are out of the weekend after severe gear damage during a standard manoeuvre in Thursday’s practice session.

When I spoke to Spain’s wing trimmer Flo Trittel, who was watching today’s practice session from our media centre balcony, Flo was pretty clear that the breakage was not operator error. Which would mean there was something wrong with the equipment. 

So does that mean the Spanish might get some kind of compensation points from a weekend not raced? “I mean obviously it's not how we want to start a season but at the same time it is what it is now, and we will try to make the best out of it,” said Trittel.

“There is still a conversation pending about compensation points that we can get given eventually because it seems like there is no human error made during that gybe. It is gear failure more than human error but as I said it's just a preliminary diagnosis and we are still waiting for the final report.”

As well as gear damage there has been sailor breakage too. Good to see Chris Draper bouncing back from his painful face scrape to be back on board Artemis. But as one comes back, another gets bounced out, following a horrible knee injury to Iain ‘Goobs’ Jensen on board the Australian boat. 

As Kinley Fowler told me today, there are few world-class replacements available, so he and Tom Slingsby’s crew are very grateful to be able to fly in the legendary Glenn Ashby at short notice to fill Goobs’ boots.

“We had had an amazing day with Goobs yesterday,” he said. “None of us had really sailed with Goobs that much before and we've never sailed him on an F50 before. But to be honest, it felt like we'd been with him for 10 years. He just fit right in and and he’s a big part of our culture now. So to lose him was pretty devastating but we always sort of have contingency plans. Glenn Ashby was the name that we had in mind, and we had already spoken to him about that in the past.

“So as soon as we knew that there was a question mark with Goobs, we gave Glenn a call and he was very happy to jump on a plane and come out here. Glenn is an icon of Australian sailing. He's obviously super-successful and he's very experienced in these boats but we have new foils which he's never seen before with the T-foils. So there's a few things that have changed over since he last sailed the F50, and Tom and the guys are just getting him up to speed now.”

Ashby’s arrival raises questions among other teams as to whether or not the replacement Australian has the relevant ‘licence’ to be eligible for racing on board an F50. ‘Licensing’ is the new word on everyone’s lips in the SailGP paddock, and we’ll be digging into that more over the weekend.

For the time being the weather looks great, windy enough without being silly. And the natural amphitheatre of Bathers Beach should provide the ingredients for one of the SailGP weekends yet.