Thousands of years ago, shortly after the second sailboat was built, one boat owner said to the other boat owner: “See that rock over there? First one around it and back to here gets…..” wait for it… “bragging rights until we do it again.” And so it has been, since before written records until now, the prize in sailboat racing has always been the pride in winning. Sailboat racing has never been about the money.
Until now. Next month in San Francisco, SailGP will hold its third annual grand final. In a complete reversal of tradition, the winner will be decided by one 15 minute race between three boats. And the winner will get $1 million. Tom Slingsby and his team from Australia have won the money in the first two iterations of the event, and is favored to win this one too.
SailGP’s pot of prize money many not even be its biggest break from sailing tradition. If the wind is steady, the hulls of the boats will never touch the water during the races – because they fly through the air on foils. Without the friction of the hulls dragging through the water, the boats can sail at three times the speed of the wind. The boats have hard airplane type wings instead of cloth sails. The racing his held right next to the land, so spectators can see. The events are choreographed for viewing on TV with camera boats, camera helicopters, TV commentators, and on screen graphics. The boats are all exactly the same, are all owned and maintained by SailGP instead of the teams, and the teams all get exactly the same amount of practice time. New teams learn from the existing teams by digging through the data from the other teams. Everyone has full access to terabytes of data that streams from sensors on every adjustable thing on every boat.
On May 6 and 7th there will be six races in San Francisco. The results of the first five races between all nine boats will be added to the results of the prior 10 events and the top three teams will advance to the grand final race. The math tells us that Australia and New Zealand are in the final for sure, and the third boat will either be France or Great Britain.
Here is a graphic that shows how the season places have changed through the first 10 events.
Clearly Australia has dominated as is indicated by the straight blue line across the top of the chart - first place in the season from the first event through the 10th event. Even Max Verstappen can’t do that! New Zealand dug themselves a bit of a hole early by starting the season in 6th place and did not establish themselves in second place until after the 4th event. France has had a crazy run from 8th place early on and then up the 3rd for a bit in events 6 and 7, and then trading third and forth with Great Britain – who started the season well, but waivered a bit along the way. Canada has had some awesome moments, and the USA started poorly and never recovered.
In the days ahead I will dig into the many mesmerizing stories in this data. I have harvested the order of the boats at every one of the 329 race marks rounded in the 54 races held so far this season. As a bit of a preview, here are the season standings at each mark rounding for the first three races.
The dark blue line shows how New Zealand started in last, and found itself in last again four more times before bouncing back up to between second and seventh. This chart shows where the boats were in cumulative points for the season (not places in each race). So New Zealand was really making some work for themselves.
Links and Resources
About the SailGP event in New Zealand (event 10):
About the SailGP event in Sydney (event 9):
About sailing faster than the wind:
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