SailGP Team Brazil
01
Days
23
Hours
55
Minutes
01
Seconds
- Official Team Name
- Mubadala Brazil SailGP Team
- Team Nickname
- Mubadala Brazil
- Boat Name
- N/A
- CEO
- Alan Adler (team operator, IMM)
- Driver
- Martine Grael
- Key Crew:
- Rasmus Køstner (Flight Controller), Pietro Sibello (Wing Trimmer), Marco Grael (Grinder), Mateus Isaac (Grinder), Breno Kneipp (Grinder) and Paul Goodison (Strategist)
- Coach
- TBC
- Ownership
- Mubadala Capital (Abu Dhabi); operated by IMM (Brazilian sports and entertainment firm)
- Established:
- 2024 (Season 5 entry)
History in the league:
June 2024 – Announced as SailGP's first South American team with Mubadala Capital backing and Martine Grael becoming the league's first female F50 driver.
September 2024 – Suffer catastrophic wing failure during training in Bermuda.
June 2025 – Take their first-ever race win at the Mubadala New York Sail Grand Prix, beating the fleet outright and proving they can compete with the established teams.
August 2025 – Front beam breakage during practice at Sassnitz forces them to withdraw from the Rockwool Germany Sail Grand Prix, their second major structural failure in less than a year.
December 2025 – Finish Season 5 in 11th place, losing both Maloney and McMillan in an off-season exodus that leaves the squad looking shaky.
New teams can take years to win a race. Mubadala Brazil broke two boats and won one race in their first eleven months. It’s the kind of turbulent opening chapter that comes from throwing an Olympic champion, a sovereign-wealth chequebook and three America's Cup veterans into the deep end of the world’s fastest sailing league.
The yellow-green F50 carries Brazil into SailGP as the first South American franchise and Martine Grael – 2x Olympic gold medallist in the 49erFX – as the first woman to drive an F50 in competition. The debut season delivered exactly one moment where everything clicked: New York in June, when they executed cleanly, made the right calls under pressure and beat teams with four seasons' head start. That silenced any early doubts about whether they were simply making up numbers or genuinely capable of climbing the standings. Yet the Sassnitz mast break a month later – their second catastrophic structural failure after Bermuda – and a string of back-of-fleet finishes left them 11th overall by season's end.
The talent exodus over winter has left the Brazilian programme looking vulnerable rather than confident. Both Andy Maloney and Leigh McMillan – the America's Cup veterans brought in to fast-track the learning curve – departed after a single season. Rasmus Køstner arrives from Denmark as the new flight controller, coach Pietro Sibello steps in as wing trimmer, while Paul Goodison looks to continue as strategist. On paper it's still a roster with credentials, but the new team is losing institutional knowledge just as they needed to build on it. For Grael and the returning Brazilian core, Season 6 becomes about proving the project has staying power beyond the headline-grabbing debut.
Rio's inaugural home event looms large on the Season 6 calendar, bringing massive local support and serious scrutiny in equal measure. Whether Brazil can turn spiky upside and hard-won lessons into consistent threat remains the central question. The talent at the helm is undeniable, the backing from Mubadala Capital suggests long-term commitment, and they've already delivered more drama than most teams manage in three seasons. The challenge now is converting that raw material into something repeatable.
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