SailGP Season 2 - St Tropez Recap
Phil Robertson - SailGP Spain Helmsman
St Tropez Sail Grand Prix 2021 - Recap
St Tropez was the most condensed regatta we have had so far, arrived Thursday, practice race on Friday, then racing over the weekend.
Typically, we’d get an additional day training to find our rhythm before the practice racing starts. To make things trickier, Friday conditions were 15 - 20kts with a nice large Mediterranean swell. The F50’s love flat water, as soon as a swell or waves kick up, they become extremely difficult to sail downwind.
Our goal for training became damage control. Don’t break the boat, keep all our crew in one piece and have a fast boat ready for a light wind racing on the weekend.
Saturday’s racing was staged in light wind races with the 24m (medium) wing and three crew onboard. This is my favorite light air configuration as the wing is super-efficient, has little drag and only having three crew onboard makes it super difficult to sail. A real challenge for the skills and coordination, any opportunity to get one over our rivals is a welcome one.
We performed well, starting reasonably cleanly (bar one OCS due to a software malfunction) and sailed through the fleet well when back in the pack. The racing is getting tighter and closer with all teams now capable of winning. Every point is crucial, we emphasised this on the last reach to the finish with a rather aggressive luff to my fellow kiwis to lock in an extra point, giving more reasons for the punters to label me as the ‘aggressive’ one.
We finished day 1 in a solid 3rd position but knew points were extremely tight ahead and behind, we had two races on Sunday to try to seal a spot in the final.
Sunday’s forecast was lighter which bought on the call for the 29m Wing (the big one) and all five crew back onboard. The challenge here was we had never sailed with the big wing so knew nothing about its characteristics or how to sail with it. The plan - get on the racecourse asap to do some learning.
It was a completely different boat to sail. Heavy, sluggish, and really difficult to maneuver. The whole COG is a lot further back in the boat, so you end up sailing with a lot more rudder lift to compensate. This also makes the maneuvers and take offs much more challenging.
We learnt fast and put down an acceptable first race in 5th, unfortunately a few sloppy decisions around the track kept us battling down in the pack.
All to play for in the last race, with points too close to try to figure out who you needed to beat, by how many spots etc to make the final. Forget match racing, the goal was win the race and hope for the best.
We put ourselves in a great position on the start line but unfortunately a wild decision by the GBR boat to go for a gap that didn’t exist resulted in a huge hole near the back of our boat. The lucky part for us was they just missed our hydraulics and the electronics that run all the systems onboard. It was one hell of a crash and one they got severely penalised for in event and season points. A solid recovery from it put us in a close 2nd with enough points to be in the top three and in the final podium race.
As you can imagine, there were a lot of distractions from fixing the damage post-race 5, leading to a prestart boundary penalty which put us behind off the line. A race with wind shifts of 60 degrees and a shut down in most parts of the course kept it open and exciting. As always, we raced to win and threw all our cards in at certain parts of the course which landed us in 3rd. Overall a good consistent event and one with good points for the season.
Whilst content, as a team we know we can do better, we will up the focus and intensity for our home event in Cadiz. It’ll be nice to have the crowed behind us and hopefully with that, the chips will fall our way!
Phil
