Their form continued – they expertly navigated the starkly different conditions in the fast and furious venues of Auckland and Sydney, qualifying for another Final in New Zealand (finishing third), and securing their first win of the season in Australia, beating home favorites BONDS Flying Roos and rivals NorthStar Canada.
Los Angeles proved more challenging. The team fell off the podium for the first time, but still secured a respectable fourth place, retaining its spot at the top of the season leaderboard. But it was a different story in San Francisco and New York, where Emirates GBR finished 7th and 8th, respectively. These results were ‘disappointing’, Fletcher says, who admits the team ‘let things slide’. “We were not doing the simple things well and we were making some absolute clanger mistakes”, he says, describing these as ‘uncharacteristic’. “We weren’t making those mistakes earlier in the season, and it’s disappointing to make those because the level is so high that you will get punished.” Despite recent back-of-the-pack performances, Fletcher remains confident as the fleet prepares to visit Portsmouth for the first time next weekend. “We’ve seen that there’s a bit of an up and down leaderboard, so we’re quietly confident that we just need to work away on our own, do a good job, and we’ll be exactly where we want to be,” he says.
For Fletcher, the team’s upcoming home event – SailGP’s first visit to the UK since Season 3 – is a chance to ‘right the wrongs’ of the last two events. Not only that, it’s set to be an event to remember. He points to Auckland’s sold-out 8,000-seat Grandstands and says Portsmouth is ‘going one bigger’. “We’re just looking forward to putting on a great show for our home crowd and coming away with a top result as well.”
Despite this, there’s ‘no doubt’, he says, that a home event brings ‘a lot more noise’ for the hosting team. “It’s busier from all sides, from media to sponsorship,” he says. “But we’re all athletes and ultimately it’s a big privilege to sail these F50s in front of the home crowds and we’ve got to take it on our shoulders.” Racing in front of home crowds also means ‘there’s more pressure to perform’, but this is ‘no bad thing’, Fletcher says. “This is a long season, it’s going to be a bit up and down,” he says. “Whether we win or not – we’ll see, but if we can come away with a solid result and keep banging those results into the overall leaderboard – we’ll be happy.”
‘Home team advantage’ is a term bandied about when the league enters home team territories – but Fletcher rejects this – ‘I don’t think we’ve seen it’. The Aussies, he says, sailed well in Sydney, but ultimately lost out to the British, while the Kiwis struggled in New Zealand’, that’s not to mention the ‘torrid time the Americans had at the U.S. events’. “I don’t necessarily think there’s a home team advantage – it just goes with the ups and downs of the season,” he says. Nevertheless, the team will be gunning to ‘take the energy from the crowd and translate it into a good result on the water’.
There’s the additional challenge of lacking racing experience in the new SailGP venue of Portsmouth. The racecourse is ‘a piece of water I’ve never raced on’, Fletcher admits, but the Solent’s conditions and challenges are familiar. It will be ‘very tidally influenced’, with ‘wavy water’, while the wind conditions are impossible to call. Fletcher’s hoping for a ‘typical sea breeze’ coming from the southwest, ranging between 27 km/h – 37 km/h, which would result in ‘spectacular racing’. Emirates GBR’s strategy, however, is simple. “Our approach is not to overcomplicate it – we’ll go back to the basics, do the simple things well, and the results will follow.”
When it comes to the competition, Fletcher says there’s currently an ‘A and B fleet’ split in the leaderboard, with the top six teams – Spain, BONDS Flying Roos, New Zealand, (Emirates GBR), NorthStar Canada, and France – representing the biggest threats.
“You wouldn’t be surprised to see any of those teams in a Final, but I guess it would be surprising to see any of the other teams in a Final,” he says, “that’s how I’m viewing it”.
This comes with the exception of the Danes, he says, who have been hampered by ‘penalty points and missing events’.
Heading into Portsmouth, he points to the current 2025 Season leaderboard podium. “We’ve currently got the top three teams from last season in the top three overall,” he says. Despite this, the team’s focus remains inward. “We’re not looking at anyone in particular, we’re really just focusing on our own racing and building the series across the whole season.”
Looking ahead to the rest of the season, Fletcher feels positive about the action-packed European leg of the season, which will see SailGP move from Portsmouth to Sassnitz (16-17 August), to Saint-Tropez (12-13 September), to Geneva (20-21 September) and to Cadiz (4-5 October) for the penultimate event before the season-deciding Grand Final in Abu Dhabi. Fletcher is looking forward to this packed schedule of events with quick turnarounds after a truncated start to the season and cancelation of Rio in May. “The time between events isn’t good for me,” he says. “It’s known that when you’re learning a new skill, it’s all about repetition.” The quick-fire schedule of events marks an opportunity for the team to put on the afterburners as the end of the season approaches, he says. “I’m hopeful that at the back end of the season, we’ll benefit from the events being closer together, so we can build some momentum.”
