SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Canada put in a solid performance to take the lead on day one of the fifth round of the SailGP season as skipper Giles Scott steered his team to a narrow win over France in Saturday’s fourth race on breezy San Francisco Bay.
Fresh off last week’s win in Los Angeles, Canada overcame a slow start in the opening race, where they finished fifth, to take the win in two of the next three races and clinch 35 points atop the weekend’s standings.
“Fifth is not where we want to finish in every race but it was a solid start as well. We had a really good day today,” said Scott.
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“The first start was particularly a tricky one with the whole fleet at the top of the box. We didn’t change too much in terms of our approach, just working that time and trying to do the best with the gaps that were given.”
The three-times champion Australians trailed Canada by three points after 2-3-3-4 race results, while Spain, who won the third race, finished third on 29 points.
France, winners in the day’s opening race, saw their hopes dashed when Quentin Delapierre’s crew, after a blistering start in the fourth race, made a costly mistake just metres from victory, ultimately finishing fourth with 23 points.
“It was a good finish, quite unfortunate in the last one. I think we started pretty well, except the two middle races,” Delapierre said of France’s 1-10-8-2 results.
“We did a few mistakes and were a bit far overall but nothing done for tomorrow.”
New Zealand’s boat, which won the season-opening leg in Dubai, will head into the second day in fifth place ahead of championship leaders Britain in sixth.
The United States had a challenging day, finishing last in the first two races and ninth in the next two, enduring a couple of incidents as they flew off the foils to splash down, on top of outside boundaries and false start penalties.
The Danish team were still unable to compete after their catamaran collided with a race marker in the first race in Los Angeles, causing damage that ruled them out of last week’s race.
(Reporting by Janina Nuno Rios in Mexico City; Editing by Ken Ferris)
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