Sometimes change for change's sake does the trick, but not often. There again, doing nothing is not an attractive option either.

This seems to be the GBR Challenge's predicament in electing to replace Andy Green with Andy Beadsworth as starting helmsman for Flight 7. Ironic that it should happen when GBR was slated to face Prada, another team that's brought pressure on itself.

In four races, Andy Green had not delivered the starts needed. He collected a penalty in a minor collision with France's Défi Areva and shown a worrying tendency to stall the boat in the whirls and twirls of the five minute pre-start. ACC boats have such super-critical foils that keeping the flow attached to them is mighty difficult.

It requires symbiotic syncronicity between the helmsman and trimmers and in GBR's case it's just another one of those areas where lack of experience counts against them. But it was the abandoned Flight 6 match against Italy's second string team, Mascalzone Latino, that exposed Green. In America's Cup racing, with TV cameras on and off the boat and computer visualisation via the Virtual Spectator tracking system, errors and shortcomings are cruelly highlighted.

In that Flight 6 start, GBR 70 was near stalled on three occasions on the non right of way port tack, almost collected a penalty and only just managed to scrape past the pin end buoy. Even then, GBR 70 was nowhere near up to speed. "The Italians executed the start well and it was a clean out," conceded skipper Ian Walker, before sweeping one Andy out and another Andy in.

GBR is one of only two teams using a specialised starting helmsman. Prada is the other, where Rod Davis (who, almost unbelievably is involved in his ninth America's Cup, having started off on the bow of Enterprise in 1977) has the job.

In Ian Walker, the GBR Challenge has an instinctive, steam-of-consciousness individual who, it would seem, would make an ideal match racer. One suspects that had Walker not been so wrapped up in managing the sailing team until the arrival of Paul Standbridge, he would have had a crack at the Swedish Match grand prix sailing tour and gained the confidence to handle an America's Cup boat in the pre-start.

The tale of the two Andys goes back to the origins of the GBR Challenge. Green shot up the match race rankings in 1997 and won two Grade 1 events (in Bermuda and New York). He was with John Kolius's Abracadabra team in the 2000 Louis Vuitton Cup and aligned himself with Oyster Marine's Richard Matthews when he bought Chris Dickson's 1995 TAG Heuer and talked of getting momentum behind a new British effort.

Beadsworth was the more practised match racer having been through two Olympic cycles in the Soling where his foes were the likes of Dane Jesper Bank (Victory Challenge's helmsman) and German Jochen Schumann (with Russell Coutts at Alinghi). Although Beadsworth climbed to No 2 in the Soling rankings he managed a 4th and 12th in Atlanta and Sydney.

Beadsworth's long held ambition was to move onto élite level big boats, either the Volvo Ocean Race or the America's Cup. For much of 2002, Green has been GBR's first pick starting helmsman. Now Beadsworth has his chance.

Tim Jeffery, 9 October 2002