Reflecting the continued appeal of the world’s leading grand prix monohull circuit, two brand new teams will join the 52 Super Series at the upcoming 52 Super Series Puerto Portals Sailing Week. The circuit’s team owners and crews look forward to welcoming Brasil’s Crioula Team and from France Teasing Machine.
Along with the debut of Ergin Imre’s freshly launched, brand new Provezza XI the fleet size for this penultimate regatta of the five event season will be a very healthy 13 boats. From Brazil the Crioula team has been at the top of fleets for many years winning titles and silverware, more recently racing their TP52 (a former Rán Racing) to continued success. The programme is led by brothers, Eduardo and Renato Plass. Eduardo is the boat’s helmsman and Renato does the backstay.
Finding the allure of the 52 SUPER SERIES strong and looking for a new, top level challenge as a team, early summer the brothers purchased the Provezza which finished second on the 2023 season and took over the Vrolijk design immediately after Imre’s crew won the first regatta of this season in Palma.
The other new team also has a long and successful track record. French owner Eric de Turckheim who is expanding his horizons to include a TP52 campaign alongside his NMYD 54 footer on which he and the crew have raced most of the world’s offshore ‘majors’, winning the 2022 Rolex Middle Sea Race and most recently this summer’s Round Ireland race. Until now the Teasing Machine team have mostly focused on offshore races but now they want to upskill their grand prix racing and compete on the 52 SUPER SERIES.
The Crioula team dates back to 2010 when they raced a Soto 40. At the same time they also competed offshore in the Caribbean and Europe on Camaringa a canting keel Soto 65. They bought the previous Paprec and raced it from 2021 at home in Brasil. Now with the new boat they are going to start off in Puerto Portals and Valencia as a step into a 2025 season which will include 52 SUPER SERIES events and potentially some ORC rating events. The team is run by Brasil’s three times Olympian Sam Albrecht and is about 40% professional 60% amateurs.
“Our team is made of good sailors and all with a lot of experience. The big secret we have is the team work, We are friends and we have several amateurs who sail very well and who could be professionals. We also work with young people from our club and region, to help train better sailors for the future.” Explains Albrecht.
“We are very excited. I think it’s such a very high level and the initial focus is on the making the owner happy and doing some good regattas. The result is not necessarily important right now, it is about learning.”
Albrecht is good friends with Provezza’s Cole Parada and Santi Lange. By way of handover the Criouala team did a few days of training on the boat with Cole, navigator Nacho Postigo, Matthew Barber, Albrecht spending time in the coach boat with Provezza’s coach Lange.
Even though they have many years of experience together racing tens of thousands of miles together, the Teasing Machine team are very much starting at ground level. The boat is due to be launched in Valencia in the coming days and they will train for a few days ahead of the 52 SUPER SERIES Puerto Portals Sailing Week.
Project manager Pages has three The Ocean Race participations under his belt including a win with Groupama.
“So far we have not sailed the boat at all and so it will be pretty challenging. We will do a few days before Portals but we really are starting from zero. We need to get a good understanding and knowledge of the boat in a short period of time. It is a little bit of a rush but we need to get in the fleet to practice, so we will be very cautious and do things step by step with no pressure. The only pressure is to not make mistakes with any of the boats. So for us this is making contact with the boat, with the fleet. We need to improve together, so there is a lot of work.” Says Pages.
“In terms of inshore grand prix racing this is quite new and different, we did the SNIM in Marseille and won Cowes Week for example, we won Commodore’s Cup but basically we have really only sailed distance races on the classics recently. Most of us are very used to inshore racing and that is our background, we have sailors from the Olympics and Farr 40s and so on. It is going to be a great discovery for Eric (owner) whose first time it will be steering a TP52 and in a fleet like this. He sailed a Melges 32 maybe ten years ago but was not steering and so this is a big challenge for him.”
Racing at 52 SUPER SERIES Puerto Portals Sailing Week runs August 28th to September 1st.