Cup favourites?

Russell Coutts and Brad Butterworth spoke to James Boyd about the Alinghi team's prospects

Who will win the America's Cup? Who will win the Louis Vuitton Cup? If there is one team that is looking on the pace at the moment it is Ernesto Bertarelli's Alinghi challenge from Switzerland.

If you want to win a team event you make sure you get the best players and in the America's Cup arena they don't come better than two times America's Cup winner Russell Coutts and his faithful tactician Brad Butterworth.

At present Alinghi are looking strong. They are top of challengers coming out of the Louis Vuitton Cup round robins. They have the biggest base - even if it is pink - of all the challenges. Their second boat SUI75 is rumoured to have considerable pace but the team are showing no sign of getting it out of its box and are happy to continue to use SUI64, despite it being one of the first of the new generation boats to have been launched.

"We like 64 and 75 is our latest version, but we don’t see any reason to race 75 just yet, so at the moment, we’ll just carry on racing 64," Brad Butterworth told The Daily Sail recently.

"The way the game works is that we try and optimise the boats all the time, so we haven’t spent a lot of time optimising 75 versus 64 as much as we’d like to. Now that the racing is happening it’s even harder. And so we’re going to try and do a bit more that before the quarter final. But they’re two pretty good boats I think."

Although during the round robins both Oracle and Prada upped their games rapidly, the only team to come close to challenging the Swiss team were OneWorld.

"I think they are very good at changing," says Butterworth of OneWorld. "They seem to be good at adapting to new ideas pretty quickly which they see out there on the water, that they see on other boats, and when they think that is good they put it on theirs and they do a good job with it. So they seem quick to change things and identify their weaknesses and hopefully we’re the same."

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