‘Not up to our standards’: New Zealand fail to fire in final SailGP event – Newstalk ZB

A tough day on the waters of San Francisco has left New Zealand with work to do if they are to improve their standing in the final SailGP event of the season.

Despite the challenges the team has faced this season, there was still a faint chance of competing in the grand final, and moving up the standings was a big goal for the team.

That got a whole lot harder after some mediocre results in the tough conditions, finishing third, fifth and eighth in the opening day's races.

"We're starting to sail the boat better and really battling with the teams at the front, but were not quite good enough at the end there," New Zealand wing trimmer Blair Tuke said.

"We've still got a lot of things to improve on. We're getting there, but that was probably not even up to our standards at the end there."

It was particularly frustrating for the Kiwis in the final race of the day a race where the Japanese team were clocked at speeds of over 90kph, but there were still pockets where the wind died away and made things difficult.

The Kiwis found themselves in one of these pockets in the day's final race, falling off their foils and struggling to get the boat going again.

"We didn't do it to the level we probably should have, so we need to really work on that tomorrow," Tuke admitted afterwards.

"It was pretty tricky, actually," New Zealand sailor Liv Mackay added. "We had some really good moments with stuff we've been practicing all week and executing that, but it was quite a difficult racecourse so we didn't really take the gains where we could have. Yeah, it was a bit tough."

The day started in fine fashion for the Kiwis, with a third-place finish in the opening race of the event.

The New Zealand crew weren't among the first off the starting line in race one, but that didn't mean much when the time came for the first manoeuvre of the race.

On the opening upwind leg, the Kiwis flew up the field aided by the Spanish crew dropping off their foils to move into third early on.

In a battle against Spain and Great Britain for fourth place overall, the Kiwis pushed throughout the course. While there were a couple of instances where they weren't quite as clean as they would have liked coming out of turns and lost some speed at times, they were able to recover quickly.

Great Britain, who were also slow off the starting line, took over after the first leg taking the opposite side of the course to most of the teams and flew to a big lead which proved to be too much to make up as they claimed first.

New Zealand and Australia had a tight battle for second, though Australia got the better of it while New Zealand finished third.

What was most interesting was the aggression of the Australian team, with driver Tom Slingsby showing no signs of taking his foot off the gas despite his team already being a starter in tomorrow's US$1 million grand final race and their boat having been damaged in practice a couple of days prior.

Slingsby again provided some excitement in the second race as he looked to undercut the Spanish team around the final mark; getting extremely close to a collision before picking up a penalty for not giving the Spanish team enough room.

The Kiwis were unable to get ahead of the field in the second and third races, finishing in the back end of the fleet, leaving them sitting sixth on the event ladder, five points behind Great Britain and three behind Spain.

While Australia made some aggressive moves, fellow finalists USA took absolutely no risk in order to protect their boat to ensure they would line up for the three-boat shootout final, and likely disappointed the home fans with some mid-table finishes.

The other finalist Japan sailed well. Without taking too many risks, the Japanese team took out the final race of the day, improving as the event went on; finishing sixth in race one and second in race two.

Watch the SailGP grand final live tomorrow. Coverage from 10am on Sky Sport and free-to-air onnzherald.co.nz/sailgp

- by Christopher Reive, NZ Herald

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'Not up to our standards': New Zealand fail to fire in final SailGP event - Newstalk ZB