Australia driver Tom Slingsby has said missing out on a fourth consecutive Championship title will ‘only make [the team] hungrier’ as he looks ahead to the start of the 2024/2025 Season.
The Aussies came second in San Francisco’s three-boat Grand Final, losing out to Diego Botin’s Spain and beating Peter Burling’s New Zealand. While Spain picked up a $2 million prize packet for winning the shootout, Burling’s New Zealand also had a payday - picking up $350k for winning the season on points.
Slingsby admitted the team felt ‘a little hard done by’ after doing ‘everything we could to win that race’, adding he expected ‘New Zealand to feel hard done by after winning the season’.
After mixed 5-1-8 fleet race finishes on day one, the Aussies were in a precarious position heading into the second day of San Francisco with the potential to lose their spot in the Grand Final.
But the team turned it around, winning both remaining fleet races and proceeding into the three-boat shootout.
Slingsby said, despite the Grand Final defeat, he was ‘proud of the team’. “We definitely won the day, but Spain won the Final race and you’ve just got to take your hat off to them because they did what they had to do and performed in the Final.”
He added that the second day of San Francisco, including the Grand Final, had seen the team ‘sail the best we’ve ever sailed’.
“You couldn’t ask for anything more,” he said. “We could have been knocked out the Grand Final but we came out and won both races.”
He added that the team were ‘in the hunt’ of Spain after overtaking the Kiwis in the Grand Final but had ‘a tech issue’ in the final stages of the race. The team, he said, were feeling ‘pretty raw’ after the result but would fuel the team’s return next season.
“I’m going through the highs and lows of it, but I can only imagine it’s going to make us hungrier,” he said, admitting the team ‘could have done a better job’. “We’ve got to identify the weaknesses we have and improve.”
