Cup boat newbie

Withhis first win today, China Team skipper Ian Williams tells us of progress in the Louis Vuitton Pacific Series

Finally after winning the World Match Racing Tour for the last two seasons, Ian Williams has finally got the gig he has been after - to helm an America’s Cup boat in anger.

With the tie-up between China Team and Le Defi dissolved since 2007 in Valencia, so Williams has been brought in to be skipper in the rejigged Chinese team. For the Louis Vuitton Pacific Series, he has rounded up a crew, including of course his Tour crew, Simon Shaw, Mark Nichols and Richard Sydenham with the addition of burly Jim Turner. Typically they sail each race with two or three Chinese sailors on board, many of whom competed with China Team in Valencia. The rest are a high calibre international mix including Sean Couvreaux, Mal Parker, Chris Main, Mikkiel Rossberg, James Spithill’s bowman Andy Fethers and Kiwi Cup veteran Sean Clarkson on main sheet. So in short - a very much higher calibre of crew than China Team has seen previously.

“It has been an interesting experience so far,” Williams told thedailysail earlier. “It is a big challenge for us to come in and just do the five days of official training and then go straight into the racing. Most of the other teams did a fair amount of training in Valencia before they got here for the official training and it has shown really. The learning curve has been very steep and we have been short of time. But it is good to know every one in the team has been able to get up to standard in the boats.”

V5 Cup boats are big, highly loaded affairs with monster bulbs and they behave like no other yacht. They are also sophisticated, highly refined and with 17 crew required to act in perfect harmony to get them around the race course successfully, there are few examples across sport in general where team work and co-ordination are of such paramount important. Oddly for his China Team newbies, Williams says that crew work hasn’t been an issue.

“I think actually, funnily enough, crew work has been a real strength of ours. I think that around the course we’ve looked as good as anybody, barring maybe the real top teams. We have certainly looked very smooth with the sail handling particularly. Where we struggle is sometimes making a mistake in starting or tactics or boat speed or something like that. There was one race where we made some slight tactical errors. In these boats with the distances involved, you need to use the instruments a lot more and the communication involved with making sure that that all gets through, becomes a little bit more complicated.”



The big lumbering V5 boats are also very different from the ‘average white boats’ used typically on the World Match Race Tour. “That impacts the start a lot. It is a different way of starting. If you get close to the line early it is very much harder to waste the time, irrespective of your position relative to the other boat. In smaller boats, if you are positioned well relative to the other boat, it is not such a problem being close to the line. But in these boats, partly because they point so high as well, but also the momentum and the speed means that if you get up close to the start line too early it is very hard to waste that time.”

As a helming experience Williams says they are a joy, particularly upwind, as few boats on the water are capable of pointing higher. While for this regatta they have been simplified slightly - rake cannot be adjusted and the jumpers on the Kiwi boats have been fixed, for example - they remain complex boats, with items such as trim tabs to deal with.

Today was significant for China Team. Day one of the second round robin, where they are now competing in the Silver fleet, they managed to get their first point on the board when they dispatched Shosholoza steered by one of Williams’ sparring partners from the World Match Racing Tour, Paolo Cian.

“It was nice to finally get one on the board. We felt we’ve been improving a lot through the regatta. But each day our competition has got harder: We started off with K-Challenge and Damiani Italia and then we went on to Oracle and then on to Team NZ. So each day we really felt we’d improved, but it was not necessarily shown in the results just because the standard of competition has improved. But then it is great to take a step back into the Silver fleet and we had Shosholoza today…”

According to Williams, today’s race was won mostly in the start when they successfully managed to lock the South African team out at the committee boat. “We had a boat length lead off the line and we managed to extend away a little bit up the first beat and rounded the top mark about 100m ahead. But unfortunately Shosholoza came down in a bit of breeze from behind and timing their gybe well which forced us on to one side of the course where there was a little less wind, and they came right in and were right on our tail around the bottom mark. Then we managed to work the right hand side of the course and stay ahead upthe beat and down the run they had a problem with their hoist. I’m not sure why but their spinnaker blew up at the hoist. And that was it.”

Looking ahead in the short term, they are up against the Greek Challenge tomorrow and have K-Challenge on Saturday. Despite being put into the silver fleet after the first round robin, they are still in with a chance. The object of the exercise at present is to finish in the top two in this round, as this will allow them to get into the ‘challenger sail-off’.

The format for the Louis Vuitton Pacific Series is a complex one, with a quasi-Cup feel to it - whatever happened Emirates Team NZ are destined to be in the final when they will meet the winner of the Challenger sail off. Prior to this there is a challenger final, the winner of the Gold fleet in RR2 automatically gets a position in this. Meanwhile all but Emirates Team NZ, the Gold fleet winner and the bottom two in the silver fleet, get to race in the sail-offs. “We get inserted at different levels, so the better you do the higher seeded you are and the later on the sail-offs we come in. If we get through the silver fleet we’ll be seeded [even he pauses at this point] sixth or seventh out of the challengers.”

So while it is unlikely that China Team will nobble the old wizened Cup teams on this, their first outing – a look at the crew line-up indicates that they may well be a forced to be reckoned with in regattas to come.