While British women and youth America’s Cup team, Athena Pathway, secured a race win on day two of the America’s Cup Preliminary Regatta, the British senior team, GB1, was forced to sit out another day due to a second boat issue.
GB1, skippered by Dylan Fletcher, was forced to sit-out a second day after suffering the return of a hydraulic issue on the one-design AC40 race boat during its warm-up laps.
GB1 CEO Ian Walker said . . . “Today was the return of an old issue that we’ve seen many times before, as have other teams, to do with the hydraulic pump in this one-design boat. We know the boat has this problem and we are always managing the problem, just seems it came back to haunt us today.”
Work continued through the night to get GB1 back on the water and the good news is that the shore team has repaired the issues from Saturday and the British senior team, will be racing Sunday.
The British Challenger of Record missed the first two races on Friday due to gear failure of a one-design supplier part on the team’s AC40.
While the team was able to repair the earlier issue in time for the third race on Friday and secured a second-place finish, missing out on five races means they currently sit at the bottom of the leaderboard on nine points.
Meanwhile, Britain’s women and youth team, Athena Pathway, has fared better, and despite a capsize is in sixth (of eight entries) after placing 6th, 7th, 7th, 6th, 1st and 6th in the six fleet races.
Speaking about the race win, Athena Pathway CEO, skipper and helm Hannah Mills OBE said: “It was so good to get a race win, especially in those super tough conditions. It was all about staying on the foils and we managed to do that and come through for the race win.
After six fleet races, the current leader is Italy’s Luna Rossa women and youth team on 45 points, second America’s Cup Defender ETNZ on 38 points. Luna Rossa’s senior team is in third on 36 points.
Final Day of racing is Sunday.
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