Plans uncovered to reinvent SailGP's race weekend – news even to the sailors

SailGP are seemingly wrestling with their current format – is it the best version of itself it can be? A survey that went out last night reveals some of the concepts the league is weighing up. It was only live for a couple of hours, but The Foil caught the lot. 

Curiously, the drivers themselves don't appear to have been in the loop: when we put the graphic below to them at the Sassnitz press conference this morning, it was news to them.

Early days, clearly, but the survey revealed plenty about where the league might be heading. We've broken it all down below…

This is the real thrust of the survey: with the mid-season shift to split fleets, how do you keep the racing both fair and entertaining? SailGP are toying with three ideas.

1- Previous Event Standings

Seeding based purely on the last event's final results, which is what's in place now. The snag with the current setup is that many of the top teams never actually go head-to-head across a weekend until they reach the final. The next idea looks like an attempt to fix that.

2- Tiered Random Draw (pictured)

Teams are split into three tiers based on the previous event (top 4, middle 6, bottom 4), then groups are drawn at random from within those tiers. Variety, but with the groups kept broadly balanced. On The Foil Podcast a few weeks back we kicked around a similar tiered system – introducing Gold and Silver fleets – and it sparked a bit of disagreement within the team about fairness.

3- Drivers Draft

This is the one we at The Foil are most excited about. The top two drivers from the last event become captains and pick their own group opponents in a live, broadcast draw – like choosing teams in the playground. Except the best won't necessarily be picked first: to make life easier, a captain might deliberately load up on weaker rivals. It'd add an intriguing new layer to a race weekend, and hands teams a real incentive to finish in that top two.

Underneath it all, this is a question about what fans really want: randomised matchups, even if they're lopsided, or groups engineered for balance. Worth noting too that these ideas assume a fleet of 14, so they're most likely aimed at next season rather than the closing events of season 6 and its 13-boat fleet.

Here's how SailGP explains the proposed "Tiered Group Racing" in its own words:

Day 1 Qualification (6 Races, 3 per group)

Teams compete in two separate groups. Overall performance in these groups directly determines a team's tier placement for Sunday.

Day 2 Finals (6 Races inc. grand final)

The top 4 teams from each Day 1 group combine to form an elite Tier 1. The bottom 3 teams from each group combine to form Tier 2.

The Path to the Grand Final:

• Tier 1 completes 2 races, with the top 3 overall boats qualifying for the Grand Final.
• Tier 2 completes 2 races.
• The top 3 boats from Tier 2 merge with the remaining 5 Tier 1 boats in a last chance qualifier race.
• The winner of this race secures the fourth and final Grand Final position.

 - - - - - - - - - - -

The survey wants to gauge what fans find exciting and what they find baffling. It asks whether they’re drawn to the scramble to make Tier 1, the raised stakes down in Tier 2, the sudden-death last chance qualifier, or the drama of a four-boat grand final. It also asks whether the group splits, the tier placements or the qualifier itself might trip fans up.

All the different tiers and stages may look confusing on paper, but my colleague at The Foil Andy Rice assures us that ‘once people have seen it once, they'll get it.’ Lewis Smith, meanwhile, has spotted an intriguing wrinkle – under this format the top three skip the third race entirely. Is that a help or a hindrance? On one hand it's a breather and a final spot already banked; on the other, the top three could turn up cold and out of rhythm just as the grand final fires up.

And all this talk of a four-boat final has us increasingly convinced that's where the championship grand final is heading, with the fleet fighting for four – not three – spots in the winner-takes-all title race. Whether that’s on the cards for season six, with only a handful of events left, not even the teams seem to know.

Another revelation: SailGP are also weighing up a change to the scoring, handing more points to the higher-placed teams across both the season championship and individual races. In the survey's own words, it's a choice between keeping the points tight versus heavily rewarding race wins.

That flies in the face of SailGP's long-held desire to keep the league level – most obviously the open data shared between teams so no one runs away with an advantage. Weight the points towards the front and you risk a widening gulf between the haves and the have-nots.

Finally, SailGP are clearly concerned with making the rules, scoring and standings clearer to their audience. The survey floats a whole menu of fixes: sharper broadcast graphics and live leaderboards, commentators taking more time to walk viewers through the rules mid-race, bite-sized social explainers, and a pre-race segment that breaks down the format before racing begins. For fans in the stadium there's talk of big-screen live standings, 60-second explainer videos in the fan zone, a "live event guide" in the app, and even QR codes dotted around the venue linking to a "how it works" sheet.

All useful stuff for newcomers, no doubt – though seasoned fans might find this hand-holding a bit much. It's a tricky balance to strike when you're trying to pull in a new crowd.

The survey signs off with a question that we’d also like to put to you: ‘What would make the 2027 format more thrilling and enjoyable to watch?’

There's plenty in here that has us at The Foil excited. Nevertheless, in a league that never sits still, every tweak brings knock-on effects nobody sees coming, for the teams as well as the fans (exhibit A: the so-called “Group of Death”). Does anything in here jump out at you? Let us know in the comments.

We’ll do some digging over the weekend in Sassnitz to find out what the athletes make of all this – once they've had a chance to read this and get up to speed, of course! – so stay tuned across our channels.