Close calls, congestion and rapid redesigns: SailGP is a new sport learning fast

New York Times

15-05-2025

The skipper of Australia's SailGP team looked back on a hectic day's racing at the Los Angeles event in March, wincing as he recalled an eye-wateringly close call with the French team.
'I just feel like we're flirting with disaster a little. So, maybe as an organization, we need to just take our foot off the gas pedal a little,' Australia skipper Tom Slingsby told The Athletic.
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At one point in one of the fleet races — with 11 teams on a very tight, congested race track in very changeable wind conditions — Australia and France found themselves on a collision course with a combined closing speed of 74 miles per hour (120 kmh). Engaged in an involuntary high-speed joust, the two carbon fiber F50s avoided each other by less than a meter.
Split-second reactions meant no one, and no equipment, came to harm.
But as one of the elder statesmen of SailGP, not to mention the league's most successful driver with three championship victories from the first four seasons, Slingsby has the authority to speak and be heard. 'We don't want to have a serious crash and then say: 'Oh, let's change. Now we're gonna make the changes.''
Slingsby said he would like SailGP to be more pre-emptive in its approach.
Responding to the Australian's concerns, a SailGP spokesperson told The Athletic it had 'AI-powered anti-crash technology', which warned teams of an impending crash. The sport also has the technology that allows teams to manage the highly complex F50s should an issue arise before, during or after a race, SailGP said.
In some respects, SailGP finds itself a victim of its own rapidly growing success. The sport is just six years old and is having to adapt quickly to ever-changing circumstances.
Slingsby's concerns about an over-congested race track are arguably a good problem to have. From just five teams in Season 1, the current Season 5 has 12 teams participating. Next season there will be two more.
But we have only seen all 12 boats on the race track at the same time on the briefest of occasions this campaign, highlighting the problems that occur when a sport has no spare boats.
We should have seen the full complement of 12 F50s launching out of the start together in Brazil. Except that didn't happen. The first weekend of May should have been Martine Grael's chance to shine as skipper of the Brazil team in front of her home crowd in Rio de Janeiro. SailGP was keenly looking forward to its first event in South America. But the event had to be cancelled at short notice after a defect was found in some of the fleet's wingsails, a decision SailGP CEO Russell Coutts did not take lightly.
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'Once we got to the bottom that we had an issue with the shear webs of the wing sails, then it was a no-brainer — there was only one thing to do and that was to fix it,' Coutts told The Athletic via email. The shear web laterally connects and provides significant additional strength to the outer skin of the wingsail. Coutts said the upgraded versions would be 'twice as strong as the old shear webs,' though a 'few kilograms heavier'.
SailGP said the area of the wingsail that bore the most load during a race was being upgraded on all 12 F50s, while further wingsail upgrades were expected throughout the season.
Asked why the wingsails appear to be more vulnerable now than in previous seasons, Coutts said: 'The boats are being raced hard now and they are probably being put under more load than what they were in Seasons 1, 2 and 3. So it's a logical progression to make this change now and be more comfortable with the wings in the future.'
A SailGP athlete, who wished to remain anonymous to protect relationships, suggested the issue with the wingsails was a knock-on effect of the upgrade of the hydrofoil package — which lifts the F50s above the water — at the start of the year, increasing the speeds of the F50s. The new T-shaped foils replaced the L-shaped foils, which had been used since the championship's inception in 2019.
'Compared with the old (L-shaped) foils, the new T-foils give you a lot less lateral leeway,' the sailor told The Athletic.
In other words, the T-foils are more grippy, leading to less sideways slippage. You could liken it to a racing car putting on a fatter, grippier set of tires that enable the car to corner more quickly without sliding off the race track. This also means more G-force for the sailors and the equipment to cope with.
'Less leeway (sideways slippage) is putting a higher loading on the spar (the wingsail),' said the sailor. 'So that's creating some of those torsional issues that I think the original design was not prepared for.'
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It's an example of the age-old problem in engineering that as soon as you improve one element of a design, it simply shifts the problem onto the next weakest point in the system. So, after the Australian wing break, Coutts and his design and engineering teams were faced with little choice other than to go back to the drawing board and beef up the wingsails sufficiently to be ready for New York in early June.
It was also the newness of these T-foils that caught Sehested off guard in that calamitous mark-rounding in L.A. The Danish skipper had not factored in the extra room he would need to allow for the T-foils, whose outboard tips protrude the same way beyond the side of the hulls.
OUCH 😬
The moment @SailGPDEN hit a race mark, thankfully no injuries to report, but the team is ruled out of racing for day 1 of the #LosAngelesSGP pic.twitter.com/O4wSVXKc86
— SailGP (@SailGP) March 15, 2025
That momentary misjudgment led to the Danes missing both events in California, and Sehested believes that his team's hopes of making the cut for the top three in this November's grand finale in Abu Dhabi are all but over for Season 5.
One of the beautiful simplicities of SailGP is that all of the F50s are centrally provided and maintained by the organizers. But the disasters that have befallen Denmark and Australia at the two events in California also highlight the weaknesses in the centralized system.
More hulls are under construction for new teams set to join SailGP for Season 6 — the fleet will increase to 14 next season — but in the meantime, the lack of spares continues to put the organizers and the race teams under pressure to preserve their gear and, after the Rio cancellation, to get the show back on track.