America's Cup - Chris Mason spoke to madforsailing at the GBR Challenge launch

Chris Mason talks to Ed Gorman about the challenges ahead in the British America's Cup campaign

Chris , obviously you have big experience of the America's Cup, what are your feelings at this stage about what can be achieved by this campaign?
At the start of it we have a good group of sailors, we've got a great design crew and the company line is that we will make the semi-finals. Personally I hope we can achieve a little bit more.

What do you think the hardest parts are going to be from the sailing side of it? Which are the real mountains to climb?
I think that basically sailing the boat is reasonably easy, but learning the finer techniques is going to be the more difficult. We won't really achieve those until the second year of sailing. What we hope to do is perfect the crew work here in England and then go out and sail against some other challenges so that we can get our match racing standards up to scratch.

Are there enough good sailors around in this younger generation - there is a lot of demand for them at the moment? We've seen several guys get off Volvo boats to come back into this, but you want a big squad - where are you going to get them from?
Well obviously we've got a squad of 16 at the moment and there have been lots of people contacting us from abroad. There are a lot of British sailors abroad who you don't really see, who are involved in the maxi circuit and who aren't really quite so high profile as the Olympic sailors. Hopefully they'll get the chance to join the challenge and hopefully the young talent will be able to help us out.

Speaking of the younger talent, there was a big emphasis at the launch today on the new generation and there are a lot of well known names that are missing from GBR Challenge. What's your feeling about this?
There are obviously some people who have decided not to get involved. Whether they will change their mind as the challenge goes through, I don't know. What I hope is that the young guys will come along and they'll get involved. It will be a different sort of sailing to what they're used to. One of the big problems with the America's Cup is actually the boredom of two-boat tuning, day-in-day-out and the slog of it. That is the hardest part of it. It's not a glamour life, it is not a glamorous sport. The actual finals are different. When you're racing in the Louis Vuitton Finals, that's great.

The bar is obviously going up all the time. You've got the two Nippon yachts from last time. How far up the hill does that get you in terms of testing, in terms of technology sails, masts and hull forms and so on? I think it is obviously going to get us up to the level that Nippon was last time which is 100 times higher than we could hope for. I think there is obviously a big step to jump for the next America's Cup but with the two designers, Taro and Aki involved, who may not have quite the same restraints as they had as Nippon Challenge designers, I feel they can go a little bit further and hopefully make that jump and give us a very fast boat.

And finally, just to put this in context, British sailing is obviously on a big heady rise at the moment since the Games. The whole thing seems to be really taking off?
It does, sailing in this country has now reached an all time high. In my 25 years involved in racing, I can't remember when it was at such a high point, especially with Ellen MacArthur and her Vendee Globe. Hopefully it will just build and build and become more and more popular.

Thanks a lot Chris and best of luck.