GB1 breaks through as Luna Ross W&Y pay heavy price in Race 7

The final day of the Louis Vuitton 38th America’s Cup Preliminary Regatta Sardinia opened with one of its most dramatic races. GB1 took their first win of the week, Luna Rossa’s Women and Youth were disqualified from the opening leg, and the fight for second in the overall standings came down to seconds.

Conditions on the Gulf of Angels were clean and quick. Around 10 knots of sea breeze, flat water, and sunny skies over Cagliari made for near-perfect AC40 sailing. After the choppier conditions of Saturday, the fleet had everything in their favour.

The start unravelled early for the regatta leaders. Luna Rossa’s Women and Youth, helmed by Marco Gradoni with Margherita Porro, Maria Giubilei and Giovanni Santi aboard, ran into penalty trouble at the gun. A confusion over their obligations left them carrying two penalties at the beginning of the first leg, with umpires watching and waiting for the team to respond. The boat didn’t. The call came through: disqualified. For a crew that had dominated the week with three race wins and just one finish outside the top two, it was a brutal way to start Sunday.

GB1, meanwhile, were finally racing. Technical failures had cost Dylan Fletcher’s team the entirety of Saturday, a traveller problem on Friday and a hydraulic failure the following day sending them back to shore before they could do anything useful. On Sunday morning their shore crew had the boat fixed and Fletcher brought it to the line with something to prove. He delivered.

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The British team got out cleanly, found pace early, and built a lead they never surrendered. La Roche-Posay Racing Team, led by Quentin Delapierre with Olympic champions Diego Botín and Florian Trittel in the boat, made a sharp start from a left shift that had been flagged before the race and pushed into second, but GB1 held them off all the way to the finish. Calm voices on the radio, a clean final leg, and a first bullet of the regatta for a team that had been a ghost on the course for two days.

“A big thank you to the shore crew for getting the boat back on the water,” Fletcher said post-race. “It just feels really nice to finally show what we can do.”

Behind GB1, the racing was tight and physical. Luna Rossa’s senior team, with three-times Cup winner Peter Burling driving alongside Ruggero Tita, Umberto Molineris and Vittorio Bissaro, went bow to bow with La Roche-Posay through the middle legs in a direct fight for second. The Italians took it at the line by two seconds.

The two Emirates Team New Zealand boats crossed simultaneously in fourth and fifth. For the last four legs, the top five had barely shifted their spacing, ETNZ Senior sitting around 31 seconds off the leader, with the ETNZ Women and Youth crew another seven seconds back.

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Athena Pathway, whose Race 5 win had been one of the highlights of the week, finished sixth. Tudor Team Alinghi crossed seventh.

The disqualification of Luna Rossa’s Women and Youth changed the complexion of the overall standings going into Fleet Race 8. A team that had looked out of reach for most of the regatta now had a different kind of pressure heading into the final race of qualifying.