The Oracle Los Angeles Sail Grand Prix will take place from 16:00 PDT, July 22 & 23 USA – 23 & 24 from 00:00 BST in UK.
Season 4 of the SailGP circuit continues with its second USA event, this weekend’s inaugural Oracle Los Angeles Sail Grand Prix, which will see the league’s fleet race on the Port of Los Angeles for the first time.
Thursday the first teams hit the water to begin practice before racing gets underway at 4pm (local time) on Saturday and Sunday.
Germany and Switzerland were the first two teams to hit the water, ahead of the full 10-strong F50 fleet beginning practice on July 20.
The racecourse of the Port of Los Angeles is very tight, with the teams navigating both a breakwater and the thermal afternoon breezes of ‘Hurricane Gulch’ across five fleet races.
As usual the top three teams will then battle it out in the winner-takes-all Final on Sunday afternoon.
Peter Burling’s New Zealand sit at the top of leaderboard from Tom Slingsby’s Australia after triumphing at Season 4’s opening event in Chicago last month.
The opening event was not a great one for Ben Ainslie and Emirates GBR, they finished in seventh place with a 2-7-8-6-10 race record.
Looking back on the event, Ainslie said it was simply the case of ‘not sailing that well and not getting the rub of the green’.
More specifically, he pointed to the team’s poor starting and making ‘a few key errors at critical times’. “As we know with SailGP, the margins between success and failure are super narrow,” he said.
Following Los Angeles, SailGP will head across the Atlantic to begin the European leg of Season 4 – kicking off with the France Sail Grand Prix | Saint-Tropez on 9 and 10 September.
SailGP Season 4 Schedule // 2023-2024 – Events in 2023
June 16-17 // Rolex United States Sail Grand Prix | Chicago at Navy Pier
July 22-23 // Los Angeles Sail Grand Prix
September 9-10 // France Sail Grand Prix | Saint-Tropez
September 23-24 // Italy Sail Grand Prix | Taranto
October 14-15 // Spain Sail Grand Prix | Andalucía-Cádiz
