SailGP: The Russell Report – Off-season

SailGP CEO Russell Coutts offers an update as the league prepares for the start of Season 5:

We may be between seasons right now, but there’s plenty going on at SailGP as we ramp up to the start of the 2024-25 Season in November. Firstly, the incoming Mubadala Brazil SailGP Team – which enters the league next season – has appointed double Olympic champion Martine Grael as driver.

Martine is a fantastic choice. Having won Olympic gold in Rio 2016 and again in Tokyo 2020, she’s proven that she can win at the top level under huge pressure. Brazil has a long history of extremely talented Olympic sailors and when you look at the talent on offer, she’s absolutely the standout candidate.

Essentially Martine’s appointment was decided by Alan Adler, ex-Olympic sailor and CEO of Brazil team partner IMM. I’m very excited about Alan leading the new Brazil team. He’s been a professional operator within sports for a long time and worked across many of Brazil’s most iconic events, including the Rio Open and São Paulo Grand Prix Formula 1 race.

With Alan on board, I expect the Brazilian team to have a highly professional approach, and that will be reflected in the athletes put around Martine.

In the past, new teams entering the league have struggled to be competitive early on. The Brazilian team has the advantage of seeing how those new teams have struggled and can take lessons from those approaches.

I don’t think anybody is under any illusions about how difficult it is to get to the top of this league – and of course it will take the Brazilian team time to gel – but I expect they’ll put a very good team around Martine and be competitive in their first season.

There’s no doubt that Martine will have a say in the selection of the rest of the crew – they’ve got to have the right chemistry, but she’s got a lot to learn, so I would definitely be looking at surrounding her with an experienced flight controller and wing trimmer.

I think the strategist role is interesting too, as that would allow Martine to focus entirely on driving the boat accurately, rather than looking around too much herself. Obviously, they need to put a powerful grinding team together. They’ll want to be fast, so they need the power up front to be able to accurately trim that wing sail.

Martine will have her first experience driving an F50 at the Bermuda training camp later this week. I understand they’ll be putting an experienced, but temporary crew around her.

We have team ownership changes coming up, including current team sales and new owners coming in, so you can imagine a number of conversations are underway with several contracts up for negotiation all at once. I think it’s safe to say athletes trading sides before the start of the season is all but certain.

The other big news is that Rio will be hosting our first ever event in South America in May 2025. Rio is an iconic city with an incredible harbour, and it’s got a very passionate sports audience who absolutely loves racing. We already have a highly-engaged Brazilian audience and the addition of this team and event will only fuel that interest.

We know that the Brazilians are famous for these sorts of sporting events, and the Enel Rio Sail Grand Prix will be no different. There’ll be a special Brazilian vibe – SailGP is becoming known for staging events which combine racing with waterside entertainment and our Rio event is definitely going to showcase that.

The U.S. team has been busy training at Bermuda’s training camp and testing out our new titanium foils (T-Foils). These T-Foils are currently in production at Strata in UAE and will be rolled out fleet-wide early in Season 5. We’re not far enough through production to know exactly which event they’ll be ready for but these T-Foils are going to change the game.

They’re around 15% faster than our current foils, the boats don’t make anything like the leeway they currently do – so it’s quite a change. There’ll be a lot of learnings for all the teams and changes to the software. The starting software will have to be adjusted as will the laylines.

The changes are pretty big, so in some ways that’s going to level the playing field of the fleet. Our Southampton facility is fully up and running with everything on stream, so we’re now in a position where we can fully produce what we need to.

Boat 11 is also well underway and it looks like we have a solution for Boat 12. So, while we’re in better shape than we thought we’d be at the end of last season, there’s still a huge amount of pressure on the remaining league-owned teams to secure financial backing to secure their spot in Dubai for our first event of the upcoming season in November 23-24, 2024.

That’s all for now – but look out for lots more exciting developments coming soon, including the nationality of the second new team entering the league next season, full crew line-ups and more host city reveals.

SailGP information – YouTube – Facebook

Season 5 Schedule
2024
November 23-24 – Dubai, UAE

2025
January 18-19 – Auckland, New Zealand
February 8-9 – Sydney, Australia
March 15-16 – Los Angeles, USA
March 22-26 – San Francisco, USA
May 3-4 – Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
June 7-8 – New York City, USA
July 19-20 – Great Britain *
August 16-17 – Germany *
September 6-7 – Taranto, Italy
September 20-21 – Geneva, Switzerland
October 4-5 – Andalucía – Cádiz, Spain
November 7-8 – Middle East *
November 29-30 – Grand Final – Abu Dhabi, UAE
* Venue to be announced

Format for Season 4:
• Teams compete in identical F50 catamarans.
• Each event runs across two days.
• Up to seven qualifying fleet races of approximately 15 minutes may be scheduled for each regatta.
• The top three teams from qualifying advance to a final race to be crowned event champion and earn the largest share of the $300,000.00 USD event prize money purse (increases to $400k for Abu Dhabi with the winning team now earning $200k at each event).
• The season ends with the Grand Final, which includes the Championship Final Race for the top three teams in the season standing with the winner claiming the $2 million USD prize.
• The top team on points ahead of the three-boat Championship Final will be awarded $350,000.00.

For competition documents, click here.

Established in 2018, SailGP seeks to be an annual, global sports league featuring fan-centric inshore racing among national teams in some of the iconic harbors around the globe.

Source: SailGP