Louis Vuitton final preview

From Auckland Peter Rusch assesses the form of the two Kiwi-led challengers

The best of nine Louis Vuitton Cup Final features two New Zealand born skippers battling for the right to face Team New Zealand, and wrest the America’s Cup from their homeland.

Alinghi’s Russell Coutts, who has won the Louis Vuitton Cup once (1995) and the America’s Cup twice (1995, 2000) faces Chris Dickson whose best result came 15 years ago as a Louis Vuitton Cup Finalist for New Zealand in 1987.

Both skippers front international teams, with a healthy contingent of fellow Kiwis alongside them. Both teams have put up impressive numbers in their races to date, and can draw on long winning streaks earlier in the competition as a source of confidence. Both teams are backed by very rich men who have sailing aspirations of their own, and who have fronted up enough money to ensure that no demand is unmet on the way to assembling some world class sailing and design teams..

But despite numerous similarities, these teams have taken very different roads to the Final, and based on the head-to-head match-up to date, the smart money has to favour Coutts and Alinghi in this series.

Oracle BMW Racing started slowly, going 5-3 in Round Robin One and losing its first race to Prada in Round Two. Team owner and occasional afterguard member Larry Ellison then shook up the team, putting Chris Dickson aboard as skipper. Dickson promptly insisted Ellison stay off the boat, and the team then cut a swathe through the Challengers, going undefeated until they met Alinghi in the Semi Finals.

Alinghi also began this regatta slower than many predicted. The team seemed to take a while to find its feet, racking up a 13-3 record (it says a lot about Russell Coutts that this is considered a ‘slow’ start!) and not looking like the dominating Coutts/Butterworth combination we’d come to expect. This was a loud team, with plenty of shouting at critical mark roundings, in marked contrast to the New Zealand teams that Coutts once ran.

But one thing that Coutts took pains to emphasise was that this was a team still finding its feet. It soon became clear that Coutts was having more trouble than he expected getting his ‘international’ team to settle into a Kiwi way of sailing.

"One of the most challenging things that faced us from day one was trying to get a culturally very mixed group of people to work together in an organized way," Coutts admitted this week.

But in the Quarter Finals, Alinghi beat Prada in three consecutive races before the Italians withdrew to focus on the Repechage, leaving Alinghi with nearly a full month to prepare for the Semi Finals, where they met Oracle BMW Racing.

Prior to the Semis, Oracle BMW and Alinghi had split two Round Robin matches, and both teams were riding winning streaks from the Quarter Finals. But in the first race, it was clear that Alinghi had stepped up a gear, as they went from winning the favoured side of the start line, to making solid gains on the first three legs of the course en route to a convincing win.

Alinghi went on to sweep the series 4-0 by an average of 48-seconds, knocking Oracle BMW into the Repechage in the process.

Why was Alinghi suddenly so dominant?

Well, for the first time in the regatta, it went with one sailing squad for the entire series, bar a couple of grinder substitutions in the final race. Long time Coutts team mate Murray Jones was settled into his role on board after missing the early races with a broken ankle and the team moved Dutch wunderkind Pieter Van Nieuwenhuyzen off the foredeck and into the cockpit, providing more experience in the middle of the boat. Finally, the Swiss team enjoyed the fruits of staying in the top group, and the additional testing time

Alinghi led at all but four marks during the series and made gains of 4:28 around the race course, compared to just 1:30 by Dickson and Oracle BMW.

So is there any hope for Ellison’s squad?

This team has a lot going for it, not the least of which is deep talent, headed up by skipper Chris Dickson. Despite predictions of an imminent blow-up at the first sign of adversity, the Oracle BMW sailing team, which was reportedly responsible for Dickson’s original exile, is excelling with him in charge.

Dickson has smartly continued to have Peter Holmberg drive the pre-starts, before he takes over for the first beat. He says he needs the first beat on the wheel to get a feel for the boat, and the conditions on the day. From that point in the race onwards, Dickson and Holmberg share the driving duties, seemingly at random. But the results aren’t random at all. In fact the only team Dickson has lost to is…Alinghi. Doh!

The ‘experts’ on the dock at the unveiling are saying that Oracle BMW Racing has painted itself into a corner, optimising the boat for light conditions. The thinking is the American team doesn’t believe it can beat Alinghi across a range of conditions, so it’s decided to make sure it can win in at least one condition, and hope the weather Gods are smiling on them. It would be ironic indeed, if the same boat that was so harshly criticised for being ‘sticky’ in the light during the Round Robins, ended up being a light wind demon in the Final.

USA-76 is still equipped with ‘the goose’ (see photo at the top of this report), the strange white pod suspended at the back of the boat that prompted questions to the International Jury by OneWorld. Those questions had the unintended consequence of eliminating the use of laser range finders that most of the afterguards had been using to determine range on the opposition.

If ‘the goose’ is some type of radar or sonic radar device, be it for monitoring the progress of the competition or for monitoring wind up the course, presumably it would fall under the same rule that bans the range finders. But Oracle BMW Director of Rules Compliance Tom Ehman insists we will see ‘the goose’ on the back of USA-76 on Saturday.

“The goose is still there,” Ehman said. “USA-76 was measured in with it and it will remain there. We've never said what it is, and people's assumptions as to what it is are wrong. Ken McAlpine (ACC measurer) knows what it is and says that it's legal.”

Both Alinghi and Oracle BMW Racing are doubtless distracted to a certain extent by the Team New Zealand ‘hula’ appendage. But both of these teams are big enough and rich enough to insulate the sailing teams from such concerns and focus on the task at hand.

One final thought when you’re handicapping the two teams for this series. Because of the new format of the Louis Vuitton Cup, Alinghi has never been in a knock-out round yet. Coutts is famous for not showing his best until he has to, and that can’t be a comforting thought for Larry Ellison, Chris Dickson, et al.

Race One begins on Saturday when Race One is scheduled with a 13:15 start.