America's Cup: Dalton says new Defender makes the current champion 'look like a battleship'
by Sail-World/The Platform 16 Jan 2024 03:50 PST
Dalton says that Te Rehutai is like a battleship compared to the Kiwi team's 2024 Cup Defender © Richard Gladwell / Sail-World.com/nz
As Emirates Team New Zealand is about to resume sailing in Auckland, the team CEO Grant Dalton was interviewed Tuesday afternoon on The Platform, by Martin Devlin on the 1300-1600 sports show "It's Only Sport".
Dalton covers a lot of ground in the interview, including his belief that the sailing teams, which has won the last two SailGP events is a much stronger team than it was in the 2021 Cup.
On the crew: "We made some changes, first of all, Nathan Outteridge came into the mix with Pete [Burling]. That helps Pete, to split the tasks on board the boat, so he doesn't have to be the conductor of the orchestra, and playing in the band at the same time. It allows them to focus on speed."
"Nathan's focusing on painting the big picture of the course.
"I guess it has made a massive difference in the communications on the boat - and just as a sailing team, they're a lot more mature.
"Ray [Davies, coach] is doing great job in the coaching along with JJ [Josh Junior] and they've made quite a big step along. It was definitely in the review of '21 and we were pretty brutal on ourselves after '21 - even after having won it twice. You need to be tough - and that was an area that we all wanted to improve, and I think that's possibly our biggest improvement today."
"We were brutal at debrief after after '21, because nobody's actually ever defended the Cup three times [post 1983], and there's some simple reasons for that.
"One is that the teams get soft. They stop making the hard decisions on people, and same with the development - and they start giving too much authority to certain people who just because they've been there a long time, think they should have it [decision making authority].
"It's easier to say yes than no."
Dalton says Emirates Team New Zealand's new AC75 design is radically different from Te Rehutai, which Dalton describes as being like a battleship in comparison to the Kiwi's latest - currently under construction. he expects the next generation of AC75s to be 10% faster than those which contested the 2021 Cup in Auckland.
To hear the whole interview theplatform.kiwi/podcasts/episode/grant-dalton-on-team-new-zealands-prep-for-37th-americas-cup part of the interview is behind a paywall.