Hustle and Bustle as Match Looms
By Russell Coutts
January 21, 2003
Source: www.sport.telegraph.co.uk/sport

I think people are starting to recognise that the America's Cup has got the potential to be a fantastic series. It's got all the intrigue of Alinghi v Team New Zealand. In coming through the Louis Vuitton Cup final against Oracle BMW, we feel we've proven Alinghi are a very good team and it's no secret that Team New Zealand are rated highly.

It was no easy thing to beat Larry Ellison and it can only have made us stronger.

We brought some confidence into this final and I thought we could win it if we did everything well. By and large we did. But Oracle performed well. They made a lot smart moves prior to this series and sailed their boat really well.

So it was tough. Chris Dickson, Peter Holmberg and their crew were hard guys to beat. Before the final I expected them to be fast and they were.

Back in early 2000, when Ernesto Bertarelli decided to challenge for the America's Cup, our objective was really quite uncomplicated and straightforward. We'd built a team of people of very varied backgrounds from scratch and we really didn't know how well we would work together. Starting up a team sounds simple, but we weren't sure how to do it or even if we could.

I'd have to say that the process hasn't finished yet but this result shows we have got a long, long way down the track. That's something the Alinghi team can be proud of.

Ernesto has been absolutely key in this process because he was able to bring a lot of lessons from his business. He has a wealth of experience in bringing people together from different countries and cultures and getting them to work together effectively in the corporate world. An America's Cup team really are like a medium-sized company.

Ernesto set out integration as our single most important goal and he took the whole team up to Verbier in the Swiss Alps. He said don't talk about design and forget about yacht racing, just talk to each other. Looking back you can see how right he was; he really urged us not to think about the details until we'd worked out a system of how to work together.

It's certainly gratifying for the entire team to have watched us develop and get to this point where nine challengers started out in the trials on Oct 1 and Alinghi are the last one left. The history of the America's Cup suggests that it is hard for new teams to achieve such a high level of performance first time around but experience, knowledge and talent is spread much more evenly nowadays.

Prada won the right to be the America's Cup defender in 2000 but it is getting harder all the time. The standard has not so much risen this time around as exploded. The last time I was in the challenger camp was in 1995 and we went through the Louis Vuitton Cup trials with only one defeat on the water and I can tell you that that felt pretty good.

Better than 2000 in fact, where, as defender, we only raced inside our own team until the cup match against Prada.

I'd have to say that being back on the challenger side of things, facing such a variety of opponents, working out how to beat them in a long trials series, making improvements to our boat and eventually coming out on top feels pretty special, too.

We have important decisions to make in the three weeks before the cup match to position our boat against theirs. How fast is the opposition boat and what conditions and how close do we want to match that profile?

In the last series, Oracle improved their boat in light winds but I think they gave away quite a bit to a stronger breeze to do it. We probably have about the same knowledge of Team New Zealand's performance as Oracle's but you never quite know the final configuration of your opponent until you line up.

Naturally, a primary decision will be whether we fit the extra hull bustle on to SUI 64. It's the so-called "Hula" hull appendage. Ours is the "J-Lo", christened by one of the funny guys in the team as its puts some volume into the back end of the boat. We've tested it on SUI 75 and it's definitely do-able with it touching the hull, but then that's against the rules.

We've got to convince ourselves that we've got the shape right to add sailing length without unacceptable drag and that it remains rule-legal throughout the series. Imagine the situation if it touched the hull during a race. You'd be disqualified . . .

We feel very, very happy to be where we are. We sailed well and you can't have good tactics unless the crew work is good. It was and it gave us options to attack. Winning the Louis Vuitton Cup gets us into the competition that every one of the challengers had set their sights on: the 31st America's Cup match.