Peter Gilmour talks to madforsailing

Bob Fisher catches up with the winner of the Australia Cup

After winning the Australia Cup in Fremantle, Peter Gilmour took time out to talk with Bob Fisher.
How is your America's Cup campaign going with Craig McCaw's One World Challenge?
It's going very well. We are less than a year into it and we have assembled a great team of people, which largely came from the initial impetus of having a core group that really attracted a lot of other people. It came from the initial ingredient of having Craig McCaw heading a real vision in the sense of wanting to do the America's Cup in the style that he has impressed upon us and the energetic and can-do type of organisation that he has. That, together with the core group that we have pulled together with Laurie Davidson and a lot of the former Team New Zealand sailors and engineers, plus Phil Kaiko. That later expanded into being able to attract a bigger design team and ensured a stronger sailing team. The initial impetus attracted others, sailors, designers, boat-builders that are focused towards a campaign that has a real chance of doing something. I am delighted at where we are right now. All organisations have their hurdles, their good and bad days, and problems that have to be overcome, but that is typical of this game.

You were pretty lucky in being able to obtain America True and Stars & Stripes.
Yes, they were two very strategic opportunities for us, we were going to purchase the Nippon boats and their programme, we had an option to do that, but we first got Stars & Stripes and getting America True was a very good coup for us. It gave us two good variant designs that probably hadn't been fully utilised by the people who had them previously and from our own experience they have benefited by being worked on by us and tuning up against each other [both came from single boat challenges].

And with Phil Kaiko on your team, you have a known yardstick.
Phil knows it and Kelvin Harrop's on the team and he was involved with America True as well. She's a good yardstick and there's the performance profiles from the Louis Vuitton series from 2000. We can always measure ourselves against that as well. It's good to have boats of known performance.

What are the sailing plans for the team right now?
We are not going to sail the America's Cup boats in the US summer. We are going to do a lot of match racing and other regattas outside of America's Cup. We have people going off in different directions at different times all over the place, and then we will be back in Auckland next summer, sailing Stars & Stripes and America True again. We have no plans to re-locate ourselves and we realise the importance of having an on-season and an off-season. Testing and tuning America's Cup yachts takes a lot of energy - it needs a one-to-one relationship with a day on the water balanced by a day off the water. We have six months on the water, so it is balanced by six months off the water in IACC boats.

When do you expect to have your new boats on the water?
We haven't finalised that. It will be sometime in 2002; the latest possible date we have discussed is September and the earliest is in March. It will be somewhere in that range; it depends on the design development.

The designers want September and the sailors want March?
That's pretty much it. It is an interesting balance because you have to focus on the areas that you know, in the light of experience, where you will have the most speed improvement. That's always a delicate balance between the designers and the sailors.

The Brits are back this time, how do you see their effort?
The British effort has done fabulously in getting the Team Nippon boats and the total package; what they have bought is the boats, the designers and everything really, it's an all-encompassing package, which will elevate them right towards the front of the starting grid. They also seem to have a lot of good young sailors, who have had a broad range of experience across a range of different areas. I've seen a lot of them perform before and I would imagine they will be quite formidable. It is a different world - 99.5 percent is not good enough, you have to be 100 percent in every area. It will be a major accomplishment if the British sailors won the America's Cup - quite awesome, because without the winning designs from last time, the engineering and the facts, it will be difficult to build up the effort and do it well. I apply that equally to ourselves as well. Craig McCaw has often said that we want to go out, as everybody is, with the aim to win and to target that, but at the same time be realistic about that and elevate ourselves to the highest possible level so that we can roll into two campaigns. Obviously if that is the British long term goal, they will benefit from one America's Cup and move forward into the next one.

Thanks, Peter.