Did SailGP dodge a bullet in Abu Dhabi?

The Yas Marina Circuit is considered to be one of the most boring on the Formula One calendar. Yet Abu Dhabi’s race track played host to one of the most interesting conclusions of an F1 Championship in recent years.

The tactical and technical errors made by McLaren in the final run-in to Abu Dhabi opened the door to Red Bull’s Max Verstappen to a possible smash-n-grab on what would have been his fifth straight Formula One driver’s championship.

It was a nailbiting (for me, at least, as a British fan rooting for Lando Norris) three-way fight for the driver’s title. But can the race track really claim much credit for the drama? Probably not. It was circumstances, not the venue, that set things up for such an intriguing showdown.

My fellow reporter at The Foil, Freddie Carr and I were in Abu Dhabi the weekend before Lando Norris’s maiden F1 victory to watch the Season 5 climax of the SailGP Championship. It has been a dramatic year on the circuit, with too many big moments to recall here.

But after the crashing, the smashing and the high-speed record breaking that we’d seen in Australasia, in the USA and in Europe, we weren’t expecting much from Abu Dhabi. Would there even be enough wind to get the fleet of F50s foiling?

Saturday’s racing was everything we hoped it wouldn’t be. The wind barely picked up to more than 6 knots and there wasn’t a sniff of an F50 popping up on the foils. The most they could hope for was to transition from ‘H2’ to ‘H1’ mode, ie. one hull flying. In the bad old days we might have settled for this, but not now that we’ve been spoiled by watching these flying machines charging around the paddock at close to 50 knots.

Just 2 knots more for Sunday’s racing brought just enough extra oomph to get the fleet up on to the foils. What a difference those 2 knots made. While even a hard-core nerd like me had quietly enjoyed the slo-mo chess moves of Saturday, now even the first-time spectators of SailGP could start to understand what all the fuss was about.

Watching these boats defying the laws of gravity at close quarters is pretty fun. Still not a patch on some of the thrills and spills that we’d witnessed in windier locations like Auckland, Sydney or Sassnitz earlier in the season, but a hundred per cent improvement on the opening day.

To cap it all, the Grand Final, the three-boat showdown between New Zealand, Australia and Great Britain was as good as it gets in that wind strength. So often these three-boat finals can be a procession, all but decided by who won the best start. Not this time though.

All three took the lead at some point, in what proved to be a finely balanced race before Dylan Fletcher steered Emirates GBR into the winning manoeuvre at the top of the course to claim Season 5 victory. A bit like the F1 finale, it all worked out nicely in the end.

So, plenty to look forward to for this time next year when we come back to Abu Dhabi for the climax of Season 6, right? Well, I hope so.

But I feel like we dodged a bullet this year. The wind just about came good, strong enough to avoid an ‘H2’ yawn fest. Can we rely on the breeze to do the same for SailGP next November and deliver a fully-foiling Grand Final again? I wouldn’t bet on it.