America's Cup: Luna Rossa's Patrizio Bertelli expands on Italian Cup direction
by Richard Gladwell/Sail-World NZ 11 Oct 2024 06:26 PDT
Luna Rossa Prada Pirelli AC75 Launch © Luna Rossa Prada Pirelli
At an Italian sailing media only press conference on Saturday, Chairman of Luna Rossa Prada Pirelli, Patrizio Bertelli expanded on many of the points outlined in the media statement issued by the team on Sunday.
An expanded and more detailed account of the session has been written by leading sailing journalist Fabio Pozzo in and published in La Stampa.
Mr Bertelli (78) co-CEO of fashion house Prada, arrived in Barcelona the day after Luna Rossa Prada Pirelli was defeated in the Final of the Louis Vuitton Cup 7-4pts by British Challenger INEOS Britannia.
As announced in the media statement, Luna Rossa will continue for the 38th America's Cup, building on the experience that has been built up since 1997. The team was the winner of the Louis Vuitton Cup on its first attempt in 2000, defeating America One 7-6, in the toughest yet Challenger Selection Series.
“We had a meeting with everyone, I talked about objective things. Namely that the team that made the fewest mistakes passed the round. And that this time we had a fast boat, the fastest of all my challenges," Mr Bertelli told the Italian sailing media.
His generous comments to his team, were in stark contrast to the 2000 America's Cup in Auckland, when he issued a media statement that blindsided his sailing team in a press conference, accusing the afterguard of "suicidal tactics"
Clearly Mr Bertelli, when assessing Luna Rossa's 2024 performance, has discounted the two races where the AC75 retired due to gear issues, and maybe also Match 5 of the LVC Final when the Italians overloaded their port foil, and washed out - handing the Brits a 100metre lead as they crossed the startline. There has been no disclosure of why Luna Rossa broke several mainail battens waiting for the start in
In terms of boatspeed accounting only, it was four wins each, and the team that made the least mistakes became the Challenger for the 37th Match.
In making that assessment Mr Bertelli is being very careful not to throw his babies out with the bath water. Taking a long-term view, Italy has had a very good 2024 - finishing equal second on the Medal table at the 2024 Olympics - with two Gold medals - both in foiling classes. Their young crew of Max Gradoni and Ruggero Tita finished second in the second Preliminary Event of the 37th America's Cup sailed in Jeddah in AC40s - beating the "A teams" from the other Challengers. Gradoni then skippered the Luna Rossa crew to a win in the Youth America's Cup, and currently the Luna Rossa crew are top of their division in the Womens America's Cup.
The fiery Italian has plenty to be excited about in Italian sailing - and that is not to forget his team have won the Challenger Final three times in six Cups.
“We all know what the America's Cup is like. We probably had two slightly negative weeks. We made mistakes and we will now see which ones. At these very high levels, you pay for them. We always talk about low percentages, small differences, but you pay for everything. We did not go to the final, precisely, because we made more mistakes than our opponents”.
On the type of errors, the boss postpones the final debriefing, Fabio Pozo reports. “But we didn’t make any gross design errors, because the boat is a very fast boat, especially upwind. Here we are talking about last-mile errors…”.
In fact, prior to Barcelona Luna Rossa had a good reliability record in all their campaigns, but the broken mainsail battens, the mainsheet traveller fracture, and the nosedive triggered by a rogue system error were out of character, but even so were not in the same league as Team New Zealand's efforts in 2003. Early in their campaign INEOS Britannia were suffering badly from capsizes, fires and adverse rulings from the Measurement Committee
Bertelli, on the question of mistakes, leaves the floor to Max Sirena, the team director. “It’s too early to make statements on this because you risk saying things you don’t want to say or things that are wrong. I think we did a lot of things well from the point of view of performance development and team building, but we also made mistakes, it’s obvious, that were concentrated in the final. The battens that shouldn’t have broken, it was an accident that should have been avoided. The wrong call with the headsail on four-all that became 5-4 for INEOS. Evidently someone was influenced by the pressure, by the fact that we had to be more aggressive and not passive”.
Sirena also looks ahead like the owner. "Now we have to metabolise and I think the most important thing is to safeguard all the good things we have done. I am convinced that the boat is probably one of the fastest boats in the fleet, this is the thing that hurts the most obviously,
The positive thing is that we have a very strong design team, a technical team, a sailing team, we have many very strong young people, who everyone envies us, who everyone is trying to take away from us, among other things”.
The Italians are very aware that the advent of foiling has changed the perception of sailing with the younger generation.
“Sailing has changed culturally from what we knew. That of Newport and that of Auckland. I would say that the last act of traditional sailing was in 2007 in Valencia. An era ended there”, says Bertelli.
Tronchetti Provera, former CEO and now Executive Vice-Chairman of Pirelli was also present at the media session saying Pirelli will part of the next Luna Rossa challenge. “We’ll see how,” he specified, "but we’ll be there".
For the full interview click here