PRESS CONFERENCE TRANSCRIPT
AMERICA’S CUP MATCH – DAY THREE
18th FEBRUARY 2003

Dean Barker – Team New Zealand
Hamish Pepper – Team New Zealand
Murray Jones - Alinghi

Q – Murray, when did you discover the right was going to be so good after the start? It looked like you changed your mind a few minutes before the start.

Murray – That’s correct. We had a plan to go left and the head of our weather team did a fantastic job and made a call with about seven minutes to go, that a right-hand shift was coming down and that totally swung our strategy to start on the right. I think that won us the race.

Q – They told you that by radio seven minutes before the start?

Murray – Yes, by VHF. Six minutes to go we throw the radio over the side in a little waterproof container.

Q – Do you always follow your weather team information, or do you make your own calls at the last minute according to your feelings?

Murray – Almost always. Sometimes we have a gut feeling. Generally we follow them because they have more time than us to study the winds and they have more information than us so why shouldn’t we trust them.

Q – Dean, a lot of people thought Team New Zealand would have an edge in pure speed. In fact the whole nation expected your boat to be faster. Are you disappointed that your boat is not better than the challenger?

Dean – No, coming into the series we thought we were going to be very even in performance. It’s hard to imagine with two boats that look so completely different but we thought in certain conditions we’d be better and in certain conditions Alinghi would be better. As it’s turned out we’ve raced against each other twice now, the third time we had a very short speed test, and there haven’t been any noticeable speed differences. We’re not blaming speed for today, we just didn’t get the decision right off the start line and that put us in a catch-up situation for the rest of the day.

Q – Your weather team told you to go to the left?

Dean – For a long time we were looking at the right-hand side, and for a period of 15-20 minutes before the start, the left was starting to look a little bit more powerful again. Somewhere between the start and that decision on looking for the left there was a bit of confusion amongst us and we thought it was going to be pretty even. As it turned out there was quite a big shift straight off the line and that made it pretty tough for us from there on.

Q – Did you realise on the last run that you weren’t going to win? We could see you on television shaking your head in disbelief.

Dean – It wasn’t disbelief, just disappointment, because we had sailed a good race, I felt, to stay as close as we did or even to catch up. On the first beat we were five or six lengths behind. Against these guys it’s very hard, they don’t give you many opportunities to catch up, and certainly not to get past. A couple of times during the race we did get close but there’s a big difference between being close and actually getting past. So it’s disappointing that we weren’t a little bit closer for the last run but they certainly deserved to win today.

Q – Hamish, when did you realise the right was going to pay?

Hamish – We came off the start line and figured we were in pretty right-hand breeze at the time. As we sailed up the beat it got more and more towards the right and worse and worse for us. It became a game of being patient and waiting for the left to come back and taking that opportunity back to Alinghi when we were going to be the closest. That came very close to the layline, there was a little bit of left-hand there, and so we came back at we think about the right time.

Q – Dean, what now? Is it time for a crew change?

Dean – No, definitely not. We don’t think we’re doing anything particularly badly, we’re very happy with the way we’re sailing, things just haven’t gone our way. In sailing when you get two teams that are very similar in performance, it doesn’t take much for the momentum to change. We think we’re fast enough, we’re sailing well enough around the course, we just have to make sure we get on the right side of them and give ourselves at least an even chance on the first beat.

Q – It’s said that Alinghi is sailing to 98% of its potential. How close to 100% are you sailing your boat?

Dean – That’s a tough question. Maybe 97%. We’re happy with the way the boat’s going, we’re certainly not using that as an excuse. It’s just the 50-50 things – hopefully a couple of those will start going our way.

Q – Dean, can you explain what you meant by confusion? Do you mean within the boat or between the boat and the weather team?

Dean – As you can imagine there’s a lot happening in the last five minutes before entry. There’s extra people on the boat, you’ve got to get all your communication gear off the boat, you’re not allowed to receive any information once you start racing, which is at five minutes, and there’s a lot of talk about wind strengths, what jib to choose, so there’s a lot of talk. Very often it’s hard when it’s a tricky day, like today was, there’s no clear pattern, it’s very difficult to get a call, you might even get a call with seven minutes to go and that might change in the pre-start and I think it’s very important that you get a clear indication from what the weather team has seen, making sure that the people on the boat know that, but still being flexible enough to change that in the pre-start.

Q – Dean and Hamish, don’t you feel that you aren’t pushing Alinghi too hard before the start? The things you were doing were not aggressive.

Hamish – In match racing you don’t have to be aggressive in the pre-start. The main goal we have is trying to win a side and win the favoured start. If we feel we’re in control of that, there’s no point in attacking the other boat because we can get the side we want. We were pretty happy with the start, we could have had either start if we’d wanted to but we chose the left because we were favouring the left at the time.

Q – Dean, Oracle brought in Chris Dixon and then the whole thing changed. The best sailing brain in the business is Tom Schnackenberg. Can we expect to see him on the boat at all?

Dean – Never say never. We don’t have the luxury of having Chris Dixon on our boat so we’re going to carry on with the guys we’ve got on the team. I don’t think it’s as bad as a lot of people think. Sure, we’re in a very tough position now, 3-0 down is not a nice place to be but we certainly haven’t given up. We don’t believe it’s having the wrong people on the boat that’s causing the problems, we just have to make sure we don’t make any sort of mistakes. We have to win five out of the next six. It’s a big ask but I have a lot of confidence in the guys to do it.

Q – Murray, just looking at the pre-start I would have thought you were actually trying for the left. It sounded like there was a decision, I think we heard Brad say with just a couple of minutes to go, ‘I wouldn’t be unhappy with the right’. Was that a compromise call and did you just get lucky or had you made the decision before you went into the pre-start?

Murray – As I said before, about seven minutes before we had a call that a shift was coming down from the right and that really swung our decision away from the left. The whole time the left was looking definitely better by the numbers from the weather team up till about seven minutes to go. We were a little uncomfortable with that, we’d sailed a couple of races in the challenger series when the wind direction was the same and it paid on the right most of the race, so we were a little bit uncomfortable with the call for the left so when the weather team said there’s a right-hand shift coming down that swung the whole thing around and we were happy to go with the right. As Dean said on their boat, we’re the same, we’re flexible, during the pre-start we’re always monitoring the breeze and we can change our plan at any time during the pre-start.

Q – Dean, what about your weather team? What was the call that they were giving?

Dean – Our weather team had a lot of different information. Towards the end they were definitely favouring more to the right but it was something that we probably weren’t as clear on as we needed to be prior to the start.

Q – Dean, you said no to crew changes. Have you or will you at some stage consider your own position as skipper?

Dean – You think I should? The crew change issue is something we’d like to have the luxury of being able to do. Making changes is difficult and it’s difficult for people to adjust in a pressure situation. I’ve got absolutely no problems with any of the guys that are on the boat, I’d be more than happy to swap with any of the guys that are sailing on the other boat and if the decision was made that I wasn’t the right guy to be skippering the boat then I’d be more than happy to live by that.

Q – Dean, small amount of rumour control. There’s a buzz around this morning that the water problem from Race One might have been engendered by a leaky rudder or maybe the trim tab bearing…something bringing water into the vessel before it started coming over the rail.

Dean – We haven’t heard those rumours.

Q – Which is to suggest that’s not what happened.

Dean – No, there certainly wasn’t a problem there.

Q – Dean, have we not yet seen the boat stretch its legs fully and does that come in conditions other than what we saw today?

Dean – I don’t think we’re going to see a big difference between the boats at all. I think the boats are very similar in performance, both upwind and downwind. Who’s to know, I think the differences are very small if there are any, and it’s still more a case of putting the boat in the right part of the ocean, than it is about straight-line speed. We tend to sail slightly different modes but the net result is we’re fairly close to even as we could be.

Q – Murray and Dean, there is a difference in age of average five years between the boats. Do you think that causes differences at times in performance or experience?

Murray – I don’t think it’s a matter of age. I guess experience - we’ve sailed a lot of races together and a lot of hard ones recently in the challenger series and I think that’s a great asset for us.

Hamish – The New Zealand team is a little bit younger than the guys next door to us but there’s a lot of experience in that team still. We’ve got Tony Rae who’s done five America’s Cups now, Barry McKay and those sorts of people, so I think the experience is there and there’s a mix of younger guys as well. Five years isn’t much and I think both teams have done a lot in the world of sailing. It’s just a case of us going out there, getting ahead and showing what we can do.

Q – Murray, given the start seemed to play such an important part in the rest of the race, if the positions had been swapped and you’d been on the left and they’d been on the right, how would you rate your chances of getting past them?

Murray – I think it would have been really difficult for us and probably Team New Zealand would have won the race. I think that first beat was a big part of the race. It appeared to me that the left didn’t pay and at one stage going out there on the left they were quite a long way behind. I think they did the best they possibly could to minimise the loss and for the rest of the race they sailed really well. I’m not sure that we would have done a better job than them.

Q – Hamish, could you remind me when the biggest comeback in your yachting career was?

Hamish – I don’t tend to look to the past too much, I like to look to the future and right now I’m looking to Thursday.

Q – Dean, you don’t seem quite as disappointed today as you were after the last race. Is that because you feel you’ve almost got nothing to lose now, having lost three in a row? Your mood seems more positive, strangely.

Dean – Thanks very much for that! Things haven’t changed for us, we have to win five races still. It’s frustrating to not get a point on the board and we don’t feel we’re sailing that badly. We’ve made two mistakes and that’s two mistakes too many and that’s cost us the points. We’re not looking to change terribly much, it’s easier to be disappointed if you feel like you’ve sailed badly. We got the decision wrong off the start and we gave it our best possible shot to get back into the race, given where we started, and I think the guys did a very very good job to keep the race as close as it was and give ourselves an opportunity. But Alinghi sailed better than us and were able to defend very well, so there wasn’t the opportunity to actually get past. We think that on Thursday if we go out there again and do everything exactly the same there could be a completely different outcome.