Home water, higher stakes: SailGP returns to Sassnitz

The Rolex SailGP Championship returns to the Baltic this weekend for the ROCKWOOL Germany Sail Grand Prix (August 22-23), the ninth event of the 2026 Season. Thirteen international teams will race meters from the shoreline in front of a sold-out crowd of 13,000 across the weekend.

Germany returns eighth in the championship but in its strongest form yet, with 13 fleet-race top-three finishes this season – more than in any previous campaign. The team has yet to claim a 2026 event win though – a milestone driver Erik Kosegarten-Heil said “would mean the world to us” at home.

“Last year, we had a very bad season until we came here. Feeling the crowd and getting their energy was a big turning point for us for the rest of the season,” said Heil. “We’ve made a lot of progress, especially on speed. We’re now able to overtake people on the course, but it still feels like we’re not getting off the line quickly enough, so the big challenge again is to nail the starts.”

The draw offers no relief: Germany shares Group B with championship leaders the BONDS Flying Roos, Artemis Racing, Emirates GBR, NorthStar Canada and the U.S.

Sassnitz boasts SailGP’s speed record – 103.93 km/h, set by Denmark’s ROCKWOOL Racing in 2025. With stronger winds expected this weekend, driver Nikolai Sehested said the fastest racetrack in the world could get even faster.

“It needs to be a good window. All things have to line up to get it,” said Sehested. “There was way more in the tank. It’s still in these boats, and it’s just a matter of time before we break 105 kilometres an hour.”

After nearly capsizing in training earlier in the week, Sehested said, “That’s definitely the wrong way to get the speed record. When you’re doing 90km/h, a crash with the water hurts almost as much as a crash with something solid.”

At the front of the championship, Spain’s Los Gallos arrive in Sassnitz as back-to-back winners in Halifax and Portsmouth, 12 points behind the BONDS Flying Roos.

“Right now, the pressure is on us. The last time we performed really well, with two wins, was last season, and after that, which would be now Sassnitz, we had a bad event,” said Los Gallos wing trimmer Florian Trittel. “So no gap is big enough, let’s say.”

Having finished second at both of those same events (New York, Portsmouth) Sweden’s Artemis Racing will be pushing for their first event in Sassnitz. Driver Nathan Outteridge said, “This year has been a really good year for us. We started as a brand-new team and, at the start of the season, we were getting some good results but never really converting them into podiums. Now we’re starting to find a little bit of form, but we’re not getting ahead of ourselves.”