Emirates Great Britain driver Ben Ainslie has said the team is preparing to ‘come out swinging’ at the inaugural Oracle Los Angeles Sail Grand Prix after a disappointing start to the British team’s Season 4 campaign.
Emirates GBR finished in 7th overall at last month’s season opener, picking up a lackluster 2-7-8-6-10 race record.
Speaking after racing, Ainslie conceded ‘it wasn’t a great event for us’, adding ‘it’s not something we’ll want to remember that much’.
Looking back on the event, Ainslie said it was simply the case of ‘not sailing that well and not getting the rub of the green’.
More specifically, he pointed to the team’s poor starting and making ‘a few key errors at critical times’. “As we know with SailGP, the margins between success and failure are super narrow," he said.
However, he said the team would ‘go away’ after Chicago and ‘work out if we’ve got issues, where they are and what we could be doing better.’
Looking ahead to the second installment of Season 4, Ainslie said the team would draw on its past experience of ‘performing right at the top of the league’ to ‘rectify’ Chicago’s poor result in Los Angeles.
“We’ve just got to keep our heads down, keep plugging away and come back swinging for LA,” he said.
It comes after Emirates Great Britain finished third overall in Season 3, after nipping into San Francisco’s three-boat shootout by narrowly beating France in fleet racing.
SailGP's first ever visit to Los Angeles gets underway with the Oracle Los Angeles Sail Grand Prix on July 22/23.
