After a 50-minute delay to the schedule, due to the fickle wind conditions, racing finally got underway at the first ever Singapore Sail Grand Prix today. The breeze built enough for the nine F50s to get around the racetrack for two races, with their 29m wings and a reduced four-crew configuration onboard. The patchy and unpredictable winds made it a tough first day on the water. Two difficult starts for the Swiss made it even harder.
Swiss SailGP Team driver, Sébastien Schneiter, on race day one: “It was good to finally get going here in Singapore. Unfortunately, we had really light and tricky conditions and only two short races today, which made things tough and a little chaotic out there.
“After our two days of training we felt like we were going really well, so it was a bit of a shame for us not to be able to execute what we did in the practice races on the racetrack. But if we have more consistent conditions tomorrow and can get some good racing in we can catch up.”
Wing trimmer, Stuart Bithell, continued “Overall, our performance was good and we sailed well but the starts let us down a little bit. We’ve been working on our starts quite a lot between the events as some homework so it's a little bit disappointing we didn’t manage to have a good one today.
"It feels like all the preparation was good but it was the final trigger letting us down. We will work on that tomorrow though. I think our teamwork, especially in a four-up configuration, has gone really well today so we are happy with that.”
Heading into tomorrow’s ‘Super Sunday’, Australia tops the scoreboard followed by Great Britain and Canada, tied on points. Racing takes place 14:00-15:30 local time, 07:00-08:30 CET. All the action will be streamed live on YouTube and throughout the day on Blue Sports and Blue Zoom.
Full broadcast information and How To Watch details HERE.
Watch the full reply of race day one HERE.
