The commanding performance of Ben Ainslie’s Emirates Great Britain SailGP Team in San Francisco’s practice racing has been explained by key racing statistics.
The British team, which is one-point away from France and challenging Quentin Delapierre’s team for the third spot in the three-boat, winner-takes-all Grand Final, picked up two race wins and one second place finish across the three practice races.
Data provided from the top four teams shows Ainslie’s team picked up a perfect 100% fly time across the three practice races, compared to Australia’s 99.5%, France’s 99.2% and New Zealand’s 98.8%.
When it came to average speeds however, two-time defending champion Australia came out on top with an average speed of 58.9 km/h, while France was the slowest with an average speed of 56 km/h.
However, it was Quentin Delapierre’s team that picked up the highest speed of the four teams, reaching a top speed of 85.9 km/h.
Emirates Team GBR made the best starts of the four teams in both positioning and the amount of time the team took to cross the line after the starting gun.
On average, the team was positioned just eight meters from the start line, and took 1.1 seconds to cross the line.
In comparison, the Kiwis were positioned 14.7m from the line, Australia was 47.7m away, while the French made the worst starts in terms of distance and were positioned an average of 53.4m away.
France also took the longest amount of time to cross the line after the gun - an average of 6.8 seconds, while Australia took 5.1 seconds and New Zealand took 3.6 seconds.
However, it was France that made the quickest starts, recording an average starting speed of 39.3 km/h, compared to New Zealand’s 34 km/h and Emirates Team GBR’s 24.9 km/h. Tom Slingsby’s Australia meanwhile made the slowest starts, recording an average starting speed of 22.4 km/h.
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