Why did Jeff Scott walk?

The Kiwi Volvo veteran puts the record straight on why he left a buoyant News Corp campaign to join djuice

As the race has progressed, djuice has gained a reputation for being a bit of a dog, but according to Scott it is not as simple as that. In fact he goes so far as to say: "With a little bit of work we could be on the pace for the next leg. I don't think you can ever point a finger at one particular area of the boat, I think these problems are multifaceted. There's sail programmes, there's where you go how you place the boat, so yeah, I wouldn't like to say it's slow. We'll wait and see what we get done on this stopover."

Far from lying back and letting the next two legs wash past them, the djuice team are pulling out all the stops to salvage something from what has been a disastrous campaign so far. They are rolling out some new sails and they will be testing them as much as possible before the restart. Scott reckons sails rather than hull shape might have been the team's chief problem up to now. "I think what's really happened is they haven't been near another boat. The other boats have been match racing around the world and developing things based on what they've seen, whereas these guys haven't seen that because they've been sailing on their own."

Illbruck are widely recognized to have set the standard with their sail programme, and the rest of the fleet has been playing catch-up trying to emulate some of their ideas. But Scott says it's not quite as simple as copying another boat's sail programme. "You can't completely change the wardrobe, because if you replace one sail in one area you misplace all the others, so you've got to be a little bit careful with the changes you make. There's nothing big we've got to do here - it's tiny little things.

"The trouble is, every single boat has a hole in one particular area, so depending on where you have that hole, you're forced to sail high or low of that weakness on another sail." The last leg across the Atlantic was a case in point. "We had that problem when the high pressure hit and we were forced to sail high, and because we had no sail in between, we couldn't sail north and so we dropped out of the pressure and ended up dropping 40 miles."

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