You can reduce all sport to numbers. They say figures don't lie - batting averages, fastest laps, goal difference, you name it.

In Auckland, the stats on everyone's lips in the 2000 Louis Vuitton Cup was the propensity of Prada tactician Torben Grael to race the breeze rather than the opponent. "Torben's averages are pretty darned high," Rod Davis was saying about the Italian team's preference to split away when in the lead.

Davis was Prada's coach at the time. Now he's on the A boat as starting helmsman. Then, as now, Davis was right. Grael ranks as one of the great shift sniffers in yacht racing.

But the figures they're talking about in this Louis Vuitton Cup relate to the weather. Round Robin 2 is turning out to be even more unproductive than Round Robin 1 and that, remember, didn't get finished until the first day of RR2. So far, eight racing days have been lost from a total of 20; six from too much wind, two from too little.

No one's surprised by it; just frustrated. Most of the Cup family expected it to be this way. Which begs the question: how have we ended with a regatta with far too little sailing? Cue a case study of management consensus producing a camel.

Odd as it may seem now in October 2002, we really have to fast-forward to March 2003. That's when the America's Cup XXXI will be sailed. It's Team New Zealand's pick as trustee and holder and it will be late summer in Auckland. That means a predominantly sea-breeze regime.

Enter the challengers. Prada is king here. The YC Punta Ala is the Challenger of Record, which means they are in the driving seat. Some would argue that Prada discarded the passenger seats in the process. After breezing through the Louis Vuitton Cup last time but then getting walloped by TNZ in the XXXth Match, Prada decided to do things differently this time.

To mirror March's sea-breeze conditions, the Challengers agreed to set wind limits (7-19 for a start, 23 once a race has started). The theory is fine. But bracketing the wind so neatly in the gradient conditions of Spring has proved to be troublesome.

Prada also wanted the trials to be less about racing, more about boat development. Hence the current structure. In place of escalating points throughout the trials, every race counts for 1pt from Day 1. This means teams can't afford to start slowly and play catch-up. Weak teams wither early on the vine and strong teams have more time to race against more potent rivals and win themselves time to continue speed development.

At the end of RR2 one team will go home after only 16 races. After the Quarter Finals, another four will be packing their tents. The impact of all this is a schedule cycling through race/speed development, race speed/development, etc. Prada also determined that the biggest gap for the Challenger should be between the Louis Vuitton final in January and the Cup match, to allow the winner to regroup, recharge and come at Team New Zealand hard.

"I can guarantee you that this system will produce the best chance for the Challenger to beat the Defender," says Laurent Esquier, Prada's operations boss and the architect of much of Prada's battle plan.

So if you work back from the Cup match, through the Challengers' race/rest routine, you end up with a starting date of the Louis Vuitton trials of 1 October. "We kinda backed up into it," says David Elwell, almost apologetically. "It was the consensus of the all the Challengers." He knows, as he is the New York YC luminary representing Team Dennis Conner in Challenger affairs.

The trouble is that 1 October is scarcely Spring in the Southern Hemisphere. It was two weeks before Daylight Saving Time came into effect in New Zealand and three weeks before the first major offshore race, the Auckland-Bay of Islands Coastal Classic, was sailed. Significantly, the trials did not begin until 17 October in 2000, and even then the ratio of lost days racing was just as high.

And it has meant the first two Round Robins have been sailed slap bang in the middle of equinox, when Australia is just heating up but while Antarctica is still stone cold from the winter months. The gradient between the two is at its most extreme and, stuck between the two, little old New Zealand catches every bit of weather of going.
Tim Jeffery, 28 October 2002