Rinse and repeat for Alinghi Red Bull Racing

Another stellar day in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia for the hard-charging Alinghi Red Bull Racing Team who completed their fourth straight day on the pristine Red Sea waters and pushed hard through the breezy afternoon with relentless starting practice.

Building the accuracy into their sailing that was at times missing at key moments in the Preliminary Regattas is clearly high on the agenda and we’re beginning to see the kind of trimming and steering that the likes of Emirates Team New Zealand, NYYC American Magic and Luna Rossa Prada Pirelli displayed so brilliantly in those opening regattas coming to the fore with the Swiss.

Today, it was a more usual driver line-up with Maxime Bachelin re-joining with Arnaud Psarofaghis on the ‘Red’ demarked AC40 whilst Nico Charbonnier jumped in to assist Phil Robertson on the ‘Black’ boat. After some initially tame starting, the intensity ramped right up with the boats desperately close in the snake-dance back to the line, killing speed, feinting the other boat, attempting the leeward hook. It was all on display and the starts got so competitive that occasional OCS’s were scored, so desperate were the sailors to get and keep an edge off the line.

This was truly top-class race preparation in world-class sailing conditions with a solid 12-18 knots of breeze and a challenging chop that again called for high accuracy, dynamic trimming and high communication demands between the sailing teams. Hard to pick a winner between the two boats but Arnaud & Maxime have developed a very strong on-water relationship with almost a second sense between them and it showed at the key moments today. Is this the America’s Cup pairing for the AC75? Too early to tell with Nico Charbonnier also driving hard with his eyes on the helming gig.

Speaking afterwards, Rodney Ardern, the legendary America’s Cup campaigner and now Alinghi Red Bull Racing’s Recon Manager and Sailing Team Manager, gave his usual terrific interview saying: “I think the point of being here is to get good conditions where we can train and we took the opportunity to come back since the boats were already here and it worked out well before Christmas, so we'll keep doing this as long as the conditions are worthwhile.”

With the America’s Cup schedule now announced, Rodney gave his thoughts on whether the Swiss team are where they want to be in their overall programme saying: “Yeah I think so, I mean you always want to try and do more in the time available but you know you have to pick and choose what you can do but I think we're on a pretty good path you know like you said we're focusing on some match-racing right now taking advantage of having the two boats and that's going to be an important part of racing come Cup time...I think we're definitely putting in plenty of time, you know we started off behind everyone of course without experience in these boats so we've got to be realistic, we’ve a long way to go, I wouldn't say we're there yet but you know we need to try and catch up for missing the last Cup and the gains that people are making this go round.”

More sailing planned for Sunday before a scheduled ‘maintenance day’ on Monday. The fruitful Arabian adventure continues for Alinghi Red Bull Racing. Impressive to watch. (Magnus Wheatley)