Spithill: 'We have no choice now but to fight our way back from the bottom'
The American team has no choice’ but to ‘fight back’ from the bottom of the leaderboard, driver Jimmy Spithill has said.
The team, which had a disastrous performance at its home event in Chicago last month, currently sits seventh in the leaderboard.
Speaking at a press conference ahead of the Great Britain Sail Grand Prix | Plymouth, Spithill highlighted the team’s similarly poor start in Season 2, which saw it finish the Bermuda Sail Grand Prix in eighth place.
“We find ourselves in the position we were in when we started the previous season - at the bottom of the table,” he said.
However, he emphasised that the team has previously ‘showed we can fight our way back’ into contention. “We’re left with absolutely no other choice now to try and put together a few consistent regattas and climb back up the leaderboard and put ourselves in contention,” he said.
Spithill is sticking with the same line-up as Chicago and Bermuda despite much speculation he would swap out athletes coming into Plymouth.
However, Spithill reiterated his ambition to build ‘consistency’ in the team. Since Chicago, the team has been ‘looking candidly through the data,” he said. “We’re not so focused on the other teams, a lot of the errors were our own making, so we’ve been pretty focused on our own performance.”
He did not confirm the line-up for Copenhagen, adding that ‘one of the biggest mistakes you can make is to look too far ahead into the future.’
“We’re not going to think about not performing,” he said. “You have to look at what’s in front of you and what’s ahead of us today is practice racing - we have stuff we want to work on and then we’ll just take it race by race.”
He agreed with Australia’s Tom Slingsby and Great Britain’s Ben Ainslie that the quality of racing in Season 3 has stepped up.
“This season is more competitive, the level is very high,” he said. “It only takes a few small errors out there and you’re quickly in the back.”
