Race Report and Results: America's Cup World Series Cascais
Qualifying - Day 9 - Championship Fleet Race
August 14, 2011
Championship Fleet Race
The Kiwis sail away with it, with
another come from behind win Sunday to take the Fleet Race
Championship.
Photo:©2011
Gilles Martin-Raget/americascup.com
Sunday Program:
One 40-minute Fleet Race for Championship. Start scheduled for
3:00 pm in Cascais.
Championship
Fleet Race:
Clean mostly even start, but Spithill away first and jumps
to downwind lead. Coutts, ETNZ, and Aleph behind, sailing deep
angle toward the bottom gate. Spithill holds a solid lead downwind,
ETNZ gains upwind on the 3rd leg, Artemis edges ahead of Coutts. Now
on final downwind leg, ETNZ gets the lead around the bottom.
Spithill and Artemis split to right gate. Upwind on final long
leg, ETNZ into 100m lead, Artemis gets ahead of Spithill, and goes
after ETNZ. Artemis does well, but not enough to catch the
Kiwis. Spithill tries for room against Artemis but it doesn't
pull it out.
ETNZ will win the Fleet Race
Championship! Artemis second, Spithill 3rd, Coutts 4th,
GreenComm 5th, Aleph 6th, Korea 7th, Energy 8th, China 9th.
See scoring and results for the whole ACWS Cascais Regatta.
Quotes of the Day:
Terry Hutchinson, Skipper, Artemis Racing: "The guys did awesome work to battle us back into the race. I think it’s probably the best that we’ve gone the entire regatta, today, so it was nice there to peak boatspeed-wise and performance-wise. Team New Zealand showed the way, kind of, down the second run, kind of showed a good spot to jibe in and showed that there was pressure over there and we could see them making a gain on Oracle4 ... so we followed them over there, we made a nice gain. Then we followed Oracle 4 around the righthand gate looking downwind and made the decision to tack earlier rather than later just to get out of the fray on that side, and the next time we came together we were ahead."
"Nobody got bogged down on the fact that I copped up the start. The first run Kevin did really nice work picking a couple good lanes for us to sail in. It’s nice to have a slightly longer leg and let the boatspeed work for you a little bit."