Ross Field to sail on News Corp

Ed Gorman speaks to the Kiwi Whitbread vet about how his team is shaping up

Field himself argues that there are few gains to be made on boat design, pointing out that in the last race the "middle of the road hull won the race, the skinniest came second and the fattest came third." But he is more than happy with his new blue and white Volvo Ocean 60 which sports a Bart Simpson cartoon character on the hull.

"It's fantastic," he said. "We've really made a huge advance as far as our boatspeed is concerned and the boat is underweight as far as we know - we've done all our measurements, we're spot on," he commented.

More critical is likely to be the sail programme about which Field is more circumspect. The word in Auckland is that the syndicate has looked at a very large number of test sails and "specials" and Field seems quietly confident that News Corp will be on the pace and possibly more than that. As with the hull and rig, the syndicate went to designers at Team New Zealand just along from them at their base in Viaduct Basin, for advice on sails, and the sail designer Burns Fallow, was one of two TNZ staffers who worked on the News Corp inventory.

"We're happy with where we are on sails but, of course, we are keeping an open mind on it. Someone's going to come out with something - it might be us - which we might end up copying," said Field cagily.

That leaves people and perhaps the biggest question mark over the syndicate. In recent weeks Field has announced that he will, after all, sail on the boat himself as navigator on all the longer of the nine legs, rather than remaining as the shore-based head of the syndicate. He and skipper Jez Fanstone agreed on this after the team had performed poorly in this year's Sydney-Hobart classic when breakages and one or two bad tactical decisions dropped them down the rankings in the Volvo Ocean 60 class.

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