Why our sport can't get enough of SailGP

If there’s one thing that’s always been missing from sailing, it’s continuity. The Olympics, the Vendée Globe, The Ocean Race, all run to a four-year cycle. The America’s Cup? Well, who knows? It runs to its own clock.

SailGP is delivering continuity in spades. Dylan Fletcher’s wetsuit is barely dry from the champagne soaking he and the British team received for winning Season 5 at the end of November. Just seven weeks later and we’re back into a full-on year of action for Season 6.

Perth is a first-time venue for the league and the teams and the organisers are excited. A bit too excited perhaps. Word is that the top brass at SailGP are a bit concerned about how well some of the 13 teams will be able to cope with the potentially explosive combination of strong winds and tricky waves in Fremantle.

If the legendary ‘Fremantle Doctor’ shows up as expected, Perth’s afternoon breeze will deliver dramatically different conditions to the closing phases of Season 5 which was mostly raced in light winds. Some of the teams could struggle, especially for those where there has been a significant change to the ‘Back Three’. 

It’s said that for sailing an F50 consistently and reliably close to the edge of performance, you want a solid line-up of driver, wing trimmer and flight controller. Change any of those three, and you’re back down the learning curve again.

We saw a bit of that with the Black Foils last season as Leo Takahashi was tasked with taking over from the solid and proven flight controller skills of Andy Maloney who departed for a bigger salary at the start-up Mubadala Brazil SailGP Team. 

On our Season 6 preview podcast, Freddie Carr and I have a bit of fun arguing about Leo’s contribution to the Kiwi team, but clearly by the end of last season the new flight controller was well bedded in alongside driver Pete Burling and wing trimmer Blair Tuke.

This is one team we won’t need to worry about for handling the gnarly conditions of Fremantle, and I think the same will be true of Los Gallos, with the Spanish maintaining a consistent line-up from one season through to the next.

So if the ‘Back Three’ are so critical to success – particularly in a new and demanding venue like Perth – then surely the new kids, Sweden's Artemis team, are going to be floundering.

Well, firstly, they’re not the new kids. Even if Nathan Outteridge has been sitting on the sidelines for the past couple of seasons wondering if he was ever going to get another ride, the Australian’s reputation runs as hot as ever.

Having been one of the hot properties of SailGP in the first two seasons as driver of Team Japan, Outteridge says his phone was running hot the moment it was announced that he was going to be at the helm of the new Swedish team.

Looking at who has ended up joining Outteridge in the key positions, one suspects that most of those speculative phone calls were wasted. Outteridge had most likely already chosen to sail alongside Chris Draper as his wing trimmer and the aforementioned Andy Maloney as his flight controller, both of whom are key players in Emirates Team New Zealand’s upcoming defence of the America’s Cup.

These are three of the best in the business and it will be one of the great talking points of Season 6 to see how quickly Sweden can start challenging the proven performers – Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand and Spain – for regular podium success. On the podcast, Freddie is much more bullish about Swedish prospects. I remain more of the view that carrying through the same line-up of key sailors from the previous season will be a key factor.

The other thing to consider with the Swedish – as well as the French and the British in particular – is how well they will manage to juggle their priorities between SailGP and the America’s Cup. Will Outteridge/Draper/Maloney racing together regularly in SailGP help their progress developing speed in the AC75? Or will it be a distraction? Probably a bit of both.

The tension between SailGP and the Cup is a story we’ll be returning to repeatedly on The Foil. Personally, I’m much more excited about the prospect of 13 teams lining up on a congested start line this weekend in Perth. It’s a spectacle that a two-boat match race will always struggle to match, although as Naples 2027 draws closer I’m sure I won’t be able to resist dipping my cup in the Kool-Aid again. 

But 13 boats on one start line... Already Tom Slingsby was voicing his concerns about safety last season with 12 F50s flying around a busy race course. It feels like SailGP dodged a few bullets last year, with some hair-raising moments, notably the Aussie wingsail shattering in San Francisco and that extraordinary weekend of drama in Sassnitz.

Fingers crossed that Perth delivers all of the right kind of excitement. It has all the ingredients for a thrilling opening to Season 6.