Dalton speaks

The old master is hurt but not yet mortally wounded

Interviewed on the dockside in Miami a clearly disappointed Grant Dalton gave a very frank explanation of the troubles that affected Amer Sports One on leg five of the Volvo Ocean race.

Are you disappointed?

Dalton - I didn't say much but I came into this leg expecting something. It was very much a highway leg and if you look at the tracks, with the exception of SEB at the corner of Recife, we all went the same way. It highlighted what none of us expected in any way, that we are desperately slow reaching. As much as half a knot, which with all our new sails, I didn't expect at all. There was nothing we could do about it. We didn't sail that bad, but we didn't sail that well. But we were going real slow.

You had a couple of bad days with bad scheds; how does that make you feel?

Dalton - Everybody has bad days with scheds and everybody said we were so lucky in the first and second leg. Well if we were, then we have been pretty unlucky in the fourth and fifth legs. That evens itself out. In the end, the fast boats were at the front and the slow boats were at the back and we were at the back and that says something about our speed at that stage.

What about the clouds?

Dalton - Again, everybody gets clouds. We were split off pretty early on, the second night in, the four boats were together, the three boats in front and us, and we had a little jump at that stage. Then a cloud came between us and we just watched them sail away on the radar. And we never recovered from that. I think it was a little inevitable because we just felt that we were susceptible at this stage, we weren't going that fast and from that we just drifted off the pace.

How do you feel now that second place has gone?

Dalton -We have the same number of points as there was from Southampton to Rio. If you look at Assa in the first two legs, they were in desperate trouble; they got a fifth and a sixth, which are not good results. It's just what we've just had. They were able to pull themselves out of there, and they're fast, they've always been fast, and strong teams excel in adversity. We will just see how we go on from here; we just have to do better.