Thanks!
As it happened the last week I remembered this thread and the race and wondered what had happened since I last looked. For reasons I didn’t follow-up.
Were the boats sandbagging (deliberately underperforming) in the previous races or was some magic sauce added as they learned lessons in those races?
Pretty sure they’re just all tweaking things and finding more speed as they go along, and were sorta leapfrogging each other.
And that’s all she wrote. After splitting the first 6 races, the Kiwis take 4 in a row to defend their title. It wasn’t super dominant - Italy could well have won two of them - but the NZ boat was a couple knots faster most of the time.
I just want to say thanks for this thread. ESPN used to cover this event religiously, but I haven’t been able to find anything about it on the sports channels. It’s astounding how powerful and stable these boats are… that should’ve warranted a few specials, if nothing else.