With so many design decisions and conclusions already made, it’s now the time that the racing sailors of the 37th America’s Cup really enjoy as their coaches unleash them from the straight-line testing constraints and start the long focus on technique. What we saw particularly in Jeddah and most starkly with the very top teams was the accuracy that they sail the boats at – and conversely how quickly any inaccuracy is punished - and it's both accuracy and consistency that are now very much in focus.

The new phase has begun and out on a pitch-perfect Sardinian morning in Cagliari, Luna Rossa Prada Pirelli were up and out early to catch the flatter water and a beautiful winter’s breeze of 7-12 knots. The near four-hour session though was punctuated by remarkable accuracy in flight with the trim team of Vittorio Bissaro, Andrea Tesei and Umberto Molineris just so assured, capable seemingly of any mode at any time in their LEQ12 that has been such a superb test platform over the past year.

Excitingly for the Cup world, today we again saw the very bright Italian future with Marco Gradoni and Ruggero Tita rotating in alongside Francesco Bruni in the helm seat for a thoroughly entertaining, hard driving, focussed session on boat-handling.

Rapier fast single board mark roundings, dynamic bear-aways with immediate gybes, the ubiquitous ‘JK’ that requires so much co-ordination and guts at a crowded leeward gate, and long-hold fast tacks where the trimmers leave it to the last minute to drop the new board, were the order of the day – and it was impressive.

The pre-start drills saw the helms shadow-boxing (presumably against a computer/AI generated model on their computer screens) and these again were fast and furious with fades, fakes, rapid accelerations and full-stop stops. Great stuff from the Italians who just went at it relentlessly all morning.

Counting the manoeuvres was nigh on impossible but the excellent on-water recon team came to a number of 73 in total and that’s a lot over micro-courses and repetitive drills. In reality the count could well be far higher.

Speaking afterwards, one of the true superstars of this America’s Cup cycle, Vittorio Bissaro, spoke to the recon team and was delighted to be into this new phase with the team saying: “We are moving into a, let's say, racing preparation period. So we are focusing on practising pre-start, and all these hard manoeuvres, so JK, tack-bear-away etc what we call hard manoeuvres so connecting different manoeuvre very close together and well it was fun, probably not as interesting for the designers, very little straight-line performance but a lot of manoeuvres that is what the sailors are aiming for.”

The recon team could really note the variances of the trim profiles on the water and quizzed Vitto afterwards with his response being: “Well every day we progress, we understand how important is the boat state in general. The first driver of performance is really the trim because it really allows the boat and foil to work at the proper flap angle so it's crucial but I mean we're learning and I think it was a very, very, good day for us in the water in terms of trim considering that swell we had from the south.”

Asked to condense and convey how important this new focus on sailing performance is, Vitto added: “To be honest a lot. As a sailor racing is the biggest part of our competition clearly and one thing that’s strange in America's Cup is the fact that we're very little sailing against other boats while Olympic sailing or any other classes the two boat or even more than two boat testing is part of everyday so it's going to be a very, very, interesting period and I'm looking forward to it." 

Luna Rossa was in flight for some 157 minutes today – impressive by any measure. The Italians are looking more than good at the moment.

Elsewhere, it was a maintenance day in Barcelona for NYYC American Magic and Alinghi Red Bull Racing - both of whom have early roll-outs scheduled for tomorrow morning.