SailGP Team Germany

So far, Germany’s SailGP story has played out like an extended stress test. The team spent much of their second season hovering at the back, discovering firsthand how unforgiving SailGP can be for relative newcomers. Then came Sydney: a practice-day trio of incidents that produced the largest single-event penalty in SailGP history, a 32-point event penalty that wiped 12 championship points. It was a hammer blow big enough to crack a project that hadn’t yet found its footing.

Instead, Germany came out the other side of it steadier, tidier and noticeably faster. Sassnitz was the first sign the needle had moved. At their home debut on the Baltic they took their first ever race win and finished 5th overall, with a legitimate front-of-fleet presence in front of 13,000 fans and a Vettel cameo at the helm that launched the team across mainstream German media. Saint-Tropez followed with a 4th overall, further proof that Sydney had sharpened them rather than spooked them.

Geneva turned that momentum into something more tangible. The German team handled the light, unsettled lake breeze calmly, avoided the unforced errors that used to define their weekends, and beat Australia and Switzerland in the Final to claim their first event win. Cádiz then underlined that Geneva was no one-off, with 3rd overall adding another solid return and extending their late-season points haul. The scale of the turnaround – from Sydney’s penalty pile-up to regular top-half results and a win a few months later – has reset expectations across the fleet.

Germany enter 2026 with a profile that looks very different from their debut. They have an Olympic helm capable of winning events, a crew that has grown into the boat, a home event that already feels like a fixture on the calendar and backing that can sustain proper sporting ambition. The penalties still sit on the record as a warning of how thin the margins are in SailGP. The late-season surge, especially the Geneva win, shows where the ceiling now lies if they keep living on the right side of those margins.