SailGP versus America’s Cup – Ainslie piecing it all together.

The final SailGP Season 3 event of 2022 will take place at the Dubai Sail Grand Prix presented by P&O Marinas, on 12-13 November.

The Dubai Sail Grand Prix is the 7th stop of the global sailing championship and kicks-off the run of globe-trotting events – Singapore, Australia, New Zealand – leading to the Season 3 Grand Final in San Francisco, USA, in early May 2023.

Driver of two-time defending champions Australia Tom Slingsby said he was pleased with the results of the European season. The team currently sits top of the Championship leaderboard with 50 points.

“We got through the European leg in front on overall points and we’re looking forward to the rest of the season,” he said, adding that the Dubai Sail Grand Prix is shaping up to be ‘an amazing event’.

Great Britain owner/driver Ben Ainslie meanwhile said the team’s plan for Dubai is just to ‘keep going’.

The team finished fifth overall in Cádiz and third in Saint-Tropez, but was unable to compete in Copenhagen at all after hitting an uncharted rock in practice.

They now sit in fourth place, ten points off the leader and this up and down performance has led to questions of focus for Ainslie.

“There’s so many ups and downs and we’ve certainly gone through our challenges this season but we’re still in the hunt,” he said. “We can certainly perform as one of the top teams and we can certainly win events and win the league – it’s just a matter of piecing it all together.”

Ainslie certainly has other things that might distract him from that laudable target.

In his position of INEOS Britannia CEO and Skipper, Ainslie has just launched the America’s Cup Team’s new T6 (LEQ12 test boat) at their winter base in Palma, Mallorca. And will also take delivery of their new AC40 in November.

INEOS now go into a frantic testing programme for both boats to gather data for the British AC team’s new AC75 which is in design in the UK and will start building in April at Carrington Boats in the UK.

Ainslie has already admitted that the data validation phase is key and was something that ultimately let the British team down in the last two AC campaigns.

T6 launch - Ben Ainslie - Mallorca 2022 — America’s Cup T6 launch – Ben Ainslie – Mallorca

Even with the strength of the team that INEOS Britannia have gathered – including Mercedes-AMG F1 Applied Science, a division of the Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS F1 Team – for the AC37 challenge, the pressure to perform in what are now two very different events is going to be difficults to switch on and off.

And in addition both events are expanding their reach with multi-events as they vie for sponsorship and media attention, all requiring much more off field involvement by the principles.

While Ainslie is not the only SailGP competitor also involved in the next America’s Cup, his long commitment to bringing the Auld Mug back home to where it first started, goes deep . . .

“This is definitely the challenge of a lifetime. We’re committed to getting the job done, it’s totally all consuming. On a number of fronts; the intensity, the technical challenge, the resources that are required, it never stops.”