5 out of 10: Team NZ vows to do better
Skipper Glenn Ashby is promising more from Team New Zealand for the business end of the America’s Cup, rating them only five out of 10 in Bermuda so far.
The genial Ashby is a hard taskmaster and his attitude is reflective of the syndicate’s determination to improve and push deeper into the regatta after beating Great Britain’s Ben Ainslie Racing 5-2 in their challengers semifinal yesterday.
On the other side of the draw, Sweden’s Artemis Racing won their three races against Team Japan to lead their semifinal series 4-3 in the race to determine who will face the Kiwis.
Team New Zealand won two races against Ainslie yesterday to eventually seal the deal but dropped the middle race with a performance Ashby described as ‘‘sailing like a bucket of spanners’’.
He wants consistency in these temperamental foiling catamarans. All the teams have had their struggles though nothing like Team New Zealand’s spectacular capsize on Wednesday. To return 48 hours and beat Britain was impressive, a fact Ashby acknowledged, though he wants better.
‘‘We are about five out of 10,’’ Ashby said when asked to rate the team’s performance through the round-robin and the semifinals.
‘‘We have a 50 per cent chance of winning the America’s Cup. I think you only have a 50-50 chance at best coming into these events and to be honest, to be able to make it through to the [challengers] final is another great tick in the box for us as a campaign going forward.
‘‘We feel we have more. You’ll never ever get to the full potential of these boats in this situation, you’ll always wish you had another week or another few days or another few hours to get things organised.’’
He likes the team’s situation compared to Japan or Sweden right now who face strong winds for the climax of their pulsating rivalry.
‘‘It will be a good gain for us [to have Saturday off]. I think to have a day to regroup and actually focus on the finals is important for us as a team.
‘‘But there is no such thing as a day off at this point of time. There is a day off the water but not a day off. We have a huge amount of work to go through as a team. Only 48 hours ago we had the boat on its ear in a thousand pieces.’’
He praised the work of the shore team to get the boat ready and also the general performance of the pedal-powered catamaran. He felt the crews’ results had repaid the frantic work of the repair team to get the boat fixed and more than competitive.
‘‘It’s a full package deal to make it through [to the challengers final] and I do think the package we have has certainly shown to be competitive. We just have to point it in the right direction to make sure we get the best out of it,’’ Ashby, who is also the team’s sailing director, said.
Reviewing the efforts against Britain, he said the starting problem in the first race was down to a button not working on one of the dagger board control systems. But they had got it going and then put
their heads down to make up a huge deficit and win.
‘‘The second race we sailed like a bucket of spanners, to be honest. I think it was the worst race we have sailed as a group. But some great lessons out of that and we will move forward. We have a lot of things to debrief and go through with that race two. We have to be brutally honest with ourselves as a sailing team and we made some mistakes there.
‘‘The last race was fairly clinical and a nice indicator of how we would like to be sailing.
‘‘So a little bit of a rollercoaster ride with our performance but a
lot of takeaways and just a feeling of relief to get through.’’
Ashby felt there was no preference between Sweden or Japan for their opponent in the challengers final.
‘‘Both those teams are very strong opponents and either one will be hard to beat to get to the America’s Cup final,’’ he said
‘‘Japan’s performance is remarkably similar to Oracle’s and Artemis are sailing the boat brilliantly. They are having a bit of a rollercoaster ride – some brilliant performances and some sub-par performances by their standards.’’