If Land Rover BAR dodged a bullet on Sunday when racing was cancelled due to a complete lack of breeze – almost certainly saving them from going 2-0 down to light-wind specialists New Zealand in their playoff semi-final – the British challenger took one squarely between the eyes on Monday.
This was luck evening itself out in brutal fashion; a mechanical failure to their wingsail - their first in years - just a couple of minutes into the first race of the day, forcing them to retire with boat damage, the noise of crunching carbon-fibre ringing out across Bermuda’s Great Sound.
Their misfortune was compounded by the fact that they also had to forfeit the second race in the best-of-nine series. Unable to sail the boat back to their base to get their spare wing, they had to be pushed back to the dockyard by their chase boats. It took so long they ran out of time to make the switch.
“Was it Winston Churchill who said: ‘When one door closes another one slams in your face’?” asked an exasperated Sir Ben Ainslie afterwards. Certainly it seems that every time the British team takes one step forward, it takes a couple backwards. Many of those setbacks have been self-inflicted of course, but this one felt particularly cruel.
It will be a long way back from 2-0 down to a team of the calibre of New Zealand. A long way but not impossible. The one encouraging aspect, from a British perspective, was the speed and boat-handling of the team in the brief bit of racing we did see.
Much had been made of Ainslie’s aggressive starts, and they could well still prove to be a factor, especially in the strong winds, possibly approaching the 24-knot limit, which are forecast for Tuesday and Wednesday. But the one we saw here did not appear to unduly ruffle New Zealand’s young helm Peter Burling.
The 26 year-old, the youngest helmsman at this America’s Cup and an Olympic gold medallist in the 49er at last year’s Olympics, managed to get the boats out of sync in the pre-start, got down to the layline first and although he had slightly less of a run-up to the start he managed to hit it with fractionally more pace and lead down to the first mark.
You might then have expected, based on the two boat's respective form thus far at this Cup, New Zealand to pull clear, but instead it was the British boat which gained ground on the first downwind leg, rounding the mark cleanly before a loud noise forced Ainslie to stop the boat.
"The wing just went 'pop' and basically it went from being our normal setting to being max camber and max power,” said wing trimmer Paul Campbell-James. “We had no way of really controlling it. We're absolutely gutted because we thought that was our day today. In three years of sailing we have maybe had one wing breakage. And here we are in the first race of the semi-finals and it goes pop.
"We were really confident today. It would have been fascinating going up that first beat and seeing how we compared [with the Kiwi boat]."
Ainslie decided to pass up the opportunity to switch wings last night and head out for a practice sail, saying there were other upgrades and changes the team wanted to make to the boat. “I think the early analysis is that we can be back racing with the same wing, just replacing the part,” he said. “That would be the ideal situation for us. The guys will work through the night to get that done and then we’ll head out in the morning.”
Asked whether he expected other teams to suffer mechanical gremlins in the strong winds this week, he added: “You can see the tolerances are so small, who knows what might happen. But you don’t want to profit from other teams’ misfortunes.
“It’s tough. But sometimes when your backs are to the wall… if you can turn it around it would be some achievement. And certainly everyone on the team still believes we can.”
In the other semi-final, Swedish challenger Artemis came from behind in the final race of the day to drawl things level at one race apiece in their match-up with Japan. The first team to win five races in each semi-final will go through to the challenger final at the weekend.
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