At a glance

America’s Cup schedule (Team NZ leads best-of-13 series 3-0):

Tomorrow: 2 races Monday: 2 races Tuesday: 2 races (if needed) Wednesday: 3 races (if needed)

He has trained and raced against Spithill and says the hardnosed Australian has the motivating skills to get his team back in the Cup match after having lost the opening four races to Team New Zealand.

‘‘I’ve been very lucky to work with Oracle for the last few years and the reality is that Jimmy Spithill is a very different character to his media persona,’’ Draper told Americascup.com.

‘‘He is an incredible motivator of the team . . . everybody within the team looks up to and listens to everything that he says.

‘‘He knows everything that is going on in every nook and cranny of the boat, and he will be there pushing everybody to get everything out of their boat.’’

Draper said Spithill had a track record in this situation that shouldn’t be forgotten after overseeing Oracle’s miracle comeback from 8-1 down to beat the Kiwis in San Francisco four years ago.

‘‘All of us last time around were ‘there’s no way Oracle can turn this around’ and I think that’s the way a lot of people were feeling after last weekend. But I do not doubt they they could come out next weekend and start winning races straight off the bat.

‘‘The reality is they had less days to react in that period and they turned things around very well.’’

Draper felt there was no miracle fix available to Oracle, it was more a case of looking for a combination of smaller gains.

‘‘It’s going to be a case of the sum of the parts, making lots of small little changes and it’s amazing the percentages of gain that those can make,’’ Draper said.

‘‘They will be looking at everything. You can change 30 per cent of the daggerboards.

‘‘That’s big changes but building stuff takes a long time.

‘‘So it will be the sum of putting all the things together, trying to increase small percentages that will end up being that three to four per cent that they need to get faster.’’

Draper admitted the opening weekend of racing in the Cup match ‘‘didn’t go as we expected’’.

‘‘I think we were all quite surprised in the differences in speed that we saw,’’ he said.

‘‘New Zealand sailed excellent races on the [first day].

‘‘But [the second day] was probably more alarming where they did actually sail away even though Oracle were potentially going better than they had been the day before.’’