Dean Barker interview - pt1

James Boyd caught up with Team New Zealand's skipper at the Swedish Match Cup

mfs: The stakes have been raised yet again with this Cup, particularly in terms of budgets. How has that affected Team New Zealand?

DB: We'd love to have more money. You'd also like to have more money at the beginning of the campaign. The whole way through we're always operating on a pretty tight cash flow. We still don't have all our money and in the back of your mind you are always worrying - what are we going to sacrifice or forego is we don't the last dollar and what effect does that have on our ability to defend the Cup.

I guess for us it is a little bit frustrating to see these wealthy individuals come in and fund a team. Money for them isn't an issue, they go about their business. They know that whatever they want to do within a certain budget, they can. That is the biggest difference for us. The upside for us is that each of the companies expects a good performance, but we don't have the same pressures. Because only one of these wealthy guys is going to make it through so there's going to be some of them who are going to be pretty upset.

The other big thing too is that money never has won the America's Cup in the past. You certainly need enough to do a good job. And Team New Zealand is like previous campaigns, - Peter Blake's motto was that every dollar you spend on making the boat go faster and that hasn't changed for us. I think you have to take that philosophy because having more money means you might try more things, but you might not end up with a better product.

mfs: How much have budgets gone up?

DB: For us it's gone up 40% probably. It is no secret - we're a lot less than half of what a lot of the other teams are spending. You could argue that our costs are a lot less because we're based in New Zealand, but still does cost us a lot of money to do it.

mfs: This America's Cup will the biggest ever - is it sustainable?

DB: That depends I suppose upon the demands placed upon it by the Challengers. I think for sure the America's Cup itself, will become more valuable than ever before because of the interest. And there's absolutely no question that it's going to be fantastic for New Zealand and the economy regardless of whether we win or lose. But in the teams of the event itself a few of the teams have indicated that they're going to be back regardless, whether this is the first or third time they have a crack at it. Who knows. A few people are in it for the long haul and they will do it at all costs. And I think that's good, good for everyone that the America's Cup grows. It would be nice to see more challengers, but it is difficult when the entry level is so high.

mfs: And presumably it is going to be much harder to win this time round?

DB: I can tell you right now we don't expect to go out and win 5-0. You hope for that. It would be an amazing achievement, but in all reality it is going to be a much closer yacht race than ever before. Because just to get through the Louis Vuitton series you're going to have to be an incredibly good team, if you look at the campaigns that are there and the people involved and the design teams - that is daunting in itself. We know that whoever we come up against to get through that will be incredibly well prepared, well funded and obviously fast. So we're just going to have to be better - to race whoever it is and go in there with the expectation that we could be one or two or three races behind. You just can't prepare yourself for the situation. But if we can walk out with 4-5 victory we'd be thrilled.

Come back tomorrow for part 2 of this interview...