The Gorman report

Ed Gorman reviews the performance of Peter Harrison's GBR Challenge

Something exciting happened in Auckland this week. It wasn't so much that the GBR Challenge got knocked out of the Louis Vuitton Cup, it was that its owner and sole financier Peter Harrison, pretty well told us that he is going to carry on and have another go.

It is worth remembering that until Harrison stepped up to the plate and did what no-one else in Britain has done in last the 15 years, namely put his America's Cup money where his mouth is, there was no prospect of a British team taking part in this fantastic event. Lots of people talked about it but no-one was prepared to actually do it.

Now, not only have we just concluded one go at it - and a respectable one at that - we are already at the beginning of the next campaign, the stage at which things get really interesting. Harrison is an egoist in the great tradition of America's Cup owners and his determination to press on is a gift to British sailing for which he should be applauded.

So where do we go from here? The travails which Prada have been through in the last couple of months remind us that moving on in the right direction from a first campaign to a second one is fraught with difficulty and it is easy to misdirect resources or aim at the wrong target.

One of the early challenges now facing Harrison is how he goes about auditing his team's performance to date. The inherent problem is that some of the people inevitably involved in the assessment might be those he would be wise to move to one side as he moves to a stronger future.

The plus points have been many. The campaign has achieved its central goal of getting Britain back into the Cup and putting a respectable marker down for a follow-up campaign. Clearly it would have been better to have gone one stage further, into the quarter-final repechage, but going home in seventh place out of nine is OK. The team was taken seriously and played the game with the best - remember that heady day when Ian Walker and his crew held the mighty Oracle BMW Racing - and they can be proud of what they achieved.

The minus points are many too but that was to be expected when you are starting from nothing. Harrison himself summed it up at the end by saying he wished he had had more time and a faster boat. "If there is a lesson, you have to start early and get your boat early but we will have a better opportunity next time," he said.

It was interesting how in the round robin stages the GBR Challenge held itself together remarkably well considering the problems which later surfaced, but when it came up against a stronger team, day after day, the weaknesses in the British effort became more and more obvious.

Among the key ones are the underlying design issues with GBR70 (Wight Lightning) which suffered from a balance problem from the off, partly to do with the fact that the mast was positioned too far back in the boat. The yacht was difficult to manoeuvre at slow speed and sluggish moving ahead from a standstill and it defeated all its starting helmsmen at some stage or other. The balance issue had big knock-on effects, undermining the confidence of the sailing team in the boat and playing havoc with the
allbeit modest sail programme.

Initially Harrison seemed determined to carry on with the design team he already has in place, led by Derek Clark, but he seems to have accepted that, impressive though they are, he can cut corners to competitiveness by buying talent from abroad at the top end of the America's Cup Class game. The key is finding the very best people in hull design, appendages, masts and sails and ensuring that they can also work together. If he gets them, Harrison could save himself a lot of money in the long-run.

Management in general is another weak area and a tricky one. While from the outside the campaign seemed professionally run, some insiders believe the management was haphazard at best and plain amateurish at worst. A major decision which still puzzles the team's rivals is why they got drawn into building such a radical second boat and then went to the expense of having it flown out to Auckland, when they had not come close to solving or even understanding the problems with the first one.

A second identical boat - which is how Wight Magic will probably end up - makes a lot of sense for the long term future of the campaign. But a second boat with a notoriously ambitious appendage design was a huge leap and one that the team didn't get even close to making. GBR78 ( Wight Magic) proved a critical distraction, not just a red herring. As one sailor from a rival camp put it: "The secret of doing well in this game is that you have got to try and keep it simple."

A more recent decision which still looks strange was the call to put Walker himself on the wheel for the pre-starts for what turned out to be the last two races, something which he himself was not expecting and may have needed
some persuading to do. This looked like panic. Why change it, and
especially when Walker has had precious little practice on pre-starts
recently in the big boats, at such a critical stage in the series? It was a
shame that the team should go down so heavily at the end but Walker had
been set an impossible task.

A related management issue is marketing where Harrison failed completely to attract corporate sponsorship which he deserves but may never get. In this area he needs a heavy-hitter but who it is is anyone's guess. (In some of these areas you can see a role for a Paul Cayard - someone who knows the America's Cup inside-out on the water but can also hold his own in the boardrooms of multi-national companies. Would Harrison be able to "live" alongside someone like that?).

Finally the sailing team. Their rivals heaped praise on the GBR Challenge crew but then there is always an awful lot of that kind of stuff at these events. A winning team saying how brilliantly the team they have just beaten sailed. The GBR crew did a good job with what we now know was a testy boat but their inexperience showed in a variety of ways and there is a strong case for buying in more experienced sailors to help bring the team on over the next couple of years.

The whole starting helmsman, race-driver business turned into a mess and a big minus point in a form of sailing in which the pre-start is so often critical to the outcome. So someone is going to have to master the whole job. Will that be Walker, Andy Green, Andy Beadsworth or Ben Ainslie or perhaps someone else who is yet to emerge? One way of finding out is by Harrison's teams going on the international match racing circuit and getting some results, something they have failed to achieve to date.